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Totally Worth It

December 28th, 2011

mio

I made this Luigi blanket for my nephew for Christmas:

It took more than two and a half months to complete. Weaving in the ends took longer than the actual crocheting part! Would you believe that there were a whopping 1040 ends to weave in on this blanket? 1040. Crazy.

It is made up of one-round granny squares, joined using this join-as-you-go method (because if I had to make all of the squares first and then join them all together afterwards, this blanket would never have been made!).

The real challenge here wasn’t the many, many ends to weave in. It was actually the lack of real estate to actually do the weaving. One of the benefits of using that joining method is that any square can be removed without disturbing the surrounding squares, which would be ruined by traveling the ends from one square to another. So, each end had to be woven in with only 12 stitches to work with. 1040 times.

But you know what?

He was over the moon about it!

Totally worth it. ^_^

Posted in 11 Blankets, Afghans, Geeky

Tags: Bernat Satin, blanket, crazy, crochet, ganny square, luigi

4 Comments »

Christmas Spoilers 1

November 11th, 2011

mio

I’ve been working on Christmas presents over the last few months, and just can’t wait to share them!

Below the cut, you will see the items I have made so far, but with no names attached. If you are on my gift-giving list and want to be surprised, I recommend that you do not continue with this post!

For the rest of you, I’ll include the pattern source when possible. ^_^

(more…)

Posted in Afghans

Tags: baby, Bernat Satin, blanket, Christmas, crayon, crochet, spiderman, star

1 Comment »

Denial

July 9th, 2011

mio

Remember this?

That’s my outside-in granny square. It looks pretty good, doesn’t it?

While in Calgary (and hiding from the rain and cold), I decided to try this on a grand scale. My goal: to make a one-big-granny-square blanket working from the outside-in.

I went to Michaels (did you know that Calgary has at least FIVE Michaels stores? Five. For the record, that is 5 times as many as Toronto has, and we just got ours recently.) and picked up some Bernat Baby Jaquard yarn that had blue and green striping in it.

If you look closely at those last two pictures, you’ll see how I ran out of the blue/green yarn (which should have been my first clue something had gone awry… 3 balls should have been enough for the size of blanket I was aiming for) and I had to buy more yarn. They were out of the blue/green, so I picked up some blue/white and kept going.

*sigh*

That crazy folding going on in the middle? It seems that the angles on my blanket are not 90 degrees like they should have been. They were more like the kind of angles you might find on a hexagon… except that there were only four of them, and not six.

I don’t know why this happened; I followed the same pattern I used on that little red square at the top of this post. Was it the yarn? I don’t know.

The real question here, though, is: how on earth did I get so far into making this before realizing that it just wasn’t laying flat? I was taking pictures during the whole process, which involved laying the thing out on the bed at regular intervals.

The answer can only be: denial.

The up side? Apparently even when suffering from denial, you can end up with a quirky poncho!