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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 »

Parce Que Je Suis

January 23rd, 2011

mio

Docteur…. QUI!

I’m knitting… please don’t tell my hooks.

(Although, it does occur to me now that you could probably immitate this pattern nicely with crochet-on-the-double, if you’re not a knitter.)

Posted in Geeky, Knitting

Tags: Doctor Who, Doctor Who Scarf, garter stitch, Knitting, scarf

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Boop Boop Beep Woo

December 29th, 2010

mio

I’d been thinking about making these hats for a while, stymied by a lack of the right colours.

I happened to be at Michaels one day and noticed that Vanna’s Choice yarn had the perfect colours! Not knowing how much I’d need, I naturally over-bought… just in case.

And so I present to you: how to wing an R2D2 hat!

First, start with a sketch:

Next, decide how big around you want the hat to be. I figured 20″ would do the trick, so I did a foundation-dc row about that long, trying (successfully) to get a number of stitches that were evenly divisible by 12 (ended up with 60).

Now, I made the first hat working from the bottom up, then, now having the pattern, I made the next one working top down. (And then had to make a third one because the second one was too big for me and my abnormally large head).

The basic pattern is as follows (from top down) :
R1: 12 dc
R2: 24 dc
R3: 36 dc
R5: 48 dc
R6: 60 dc
All following rounds: 60 dc.

13 or 14 rounds should do it for a kid’s hat. For an adult, do some increases on R7, but take my advice: adding 6 more stitches is too many! :P

Basically, just plug the colours in as per the sketch!

The final step is to make that eye thingie… with black, do a round of 12dc. Then a round of *5dc, hdc, hdc* four times in blue and sew it on.

Of course, I had to make scarves to go with them!

They’re about 3.5 feet long… I think…

This one used post stitches (both dc and tr)

This one used back-loop-only dc stitches:

The green part worked out even better than I thought it would.

I started with a row of foundation dc stitches approximately 3 feet long. Then I did 5 dc stitches into the base of the last foundation dc, then did 1 dc stitch into the bottom of each foundation dc that followed until I had worked into all of them.

Next was a turning chain, 1dc in each stitch until the rounded end, where I did 2dc in each of the 6 stitches making up the rounded end. Then 1 dc in each stitch until the end.

Turning chain, 1dc in each stitch until the rounded end. Then *2dc, 1dc* 6 times to get around the end, then 1dc in each stitch.

Turning chain, 1dc in each stitch, *2dc, 1dc, 1dc* 6 times to get around the end, 1dc in each.

When I got to the flat end this time, I did ch1, then worked sc stitches along the flat edge, basically working 2 sc into the side of each dc, plus an extra one right in the centre.

I then switched to grey and made up the hilts as I went along. If you’re not comfortable with this, a nice, simple hilt could be made by working a dc in the back loop only into each stitch, for as many rows as you think look nice.

Rounded end:

I just love how well working into the bottom of the foundation stitches worked! I think it looks really smart. I’m going to have to use this technique again!