I was born in 1977, but our story begins earlier than that. The details are a little bit fuzzy now, but as best we can figure it, it begins in the early 70’s.

My aunt gave my parents a blanket for their anniversary. It was a granny square blanket, in Christmas colours (I’m not sure if she intended it to be a Christmas blanket, or if she just figured it would go well with their decor; either way, it featured in a lot of our Christmas pictures!).

Mom loved it, and so my aunt taught her how to crochet and gave her the pattern.

Mom made one in those classic 70’s colours: yellow, orange, green, and brown. That blanket had a home on Mom’s rocking chair for as long as I can remember. I loved that blanket; I just thought it was so pretty!

We searched through all of the photo albums, and the packages of non-albumed pictures and couldn’t find a decent picture of it; one that really showed off the handiwork (I know, right?). This is the best we could find:

(Don’t mind the fuzzed-out face of my adorable niece… and that knit blanket on top of it was made by Mom’s Mom. Just to round out this Crafty Family story, Dad’s Mom made beautiful quilts and she made my grade 8 graduation dress)

As luck would have it, after resigning ourselves to this scrap of a picture, Mom thought of a place the blanket could be hiding, and sure enough, we found it in Dad’s workshop!

All I can say is, Mom must have really liked crocheting! I mean, just look at the size of this thing!

Mom also made a baby blanket for one of my brothers, but I’m not sure if she ever made anything else. It may be possible that my brothers and I were a bit of a handful… ^_-

Anyhow, by the time I came along, she seemed to have long stopped crocheting, and by the time I was old enough to wonder how this wonderful blanket was made, she had forgotten how to do it.

After that, I was a woman on a mission, determined to learn how the blanket was made and recreate it. I swore that I’d learn how to crochet so that I could make a granny square blanket.

That was 13 years ago… you may have noticed that the only granny blanket I’ve ever shown here was one big, hole-y square (well, and the Eventually Granny Blanket, but it’s not really the same thing). It’s not that I don’t know how to make a granny blanket; I have, in fact, started many!

But now… now is different, for I have finally found the perfect yarn for it!

(Bernat Satin: Tangerine, Mocha, Fern, and Banana)

I guess the only question now is, what do we do with the old one? You can see from the pictures that it’s falling apart (that thing saw a LOT of love!). I might be able to take off the squares that are ripped and scavenge enough brown yarn off of them to sew the intact pieces back together to make a smaller, but still useable blanket, but I’m not sure where we’d ever use it.

Mom doesn’t have that rocking chair anymore, and the colours don’t go with her decor anymore, but it would be a terrible shame to get rid of it. Any ideas?

My friend Dennis, of Weatherbe Sweets, surprised me with this awesomely detailed (and very yummy!) Settlers of Catan cake:

Complete with all of the pieces needed to play the Cities and Knights expansion.

Of COURSE we played with it!

I played green, and was doing fairly well…

… until Chris (the recipient of my first Catan blanket and He Who Claims Credit For The Idea of the cake) started eating my playing pieces.

A few rolls into the game and the Barbarians attacked and started eating the cake island

If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em!

Thank you Dennis and Chris!

You’ll find it under “Granny” at the top of this page, click here: http://fantasticmio.com/granny

I still haven’t figured out how to enable comments on the pattern pages, so feel free to leave them here instead. Especially let me know if you decide to try this pattern!

Where did the swag bags come from, then? Well!

I’m working from the list of donors on the KAL blog, and doing some educated guess work, so I may not be totally accurate here… if you know better, please tell me, and I’ll fix it! (ETA: fixed the things mentioned in the first comment!)

Let’s start with:

Two balls of my very favouritest yarn, Bernat Satin, from Spinrite!

(My crochet guild is working on arranging a bus trip up to Listowel to see the fine people at Spinrite. I can’t wait! Also, while I’m on the subject, keep your eyes on the top bar of this blog; I’m planning a “yarn” tab)

Next is some superwash merino from Diamond Yarn:

Then there are a couple of sets of knitting needles. The wooden ones are 19mm (!) and are from the Purple Purl, and the 4.5mm needles are from Romni Wools:

A handful of books from Simon and Schuster:

There were also coupons in the bags, from the Purple Purl, Mary Maxim, and Knit-o-Matic

Here is the t-shirt I won:

And the bags it all came in:

(The black one was this year’s bag, the white one was from last year, and it had the t-shirt in it)

Thanks again to the TTC KAL folks, and all of the donors (a full list of which you can see on the TTC KAL blog)

I can not wait until next year! I’ll try to remember to post about it in time for people to sign up and come along (you know, instead of the night before… heh)

Charles: I could really go for a grilled cheese sandwich
Becky: There’s a place two doors down from Lettuce Knit that apparently has great grilled cheese sandwiches
Charles: You know, we really should go to Lettuce Knit!
Becky: Ok, but that’s where I got that skein of $39 yarn…
Charles: I seem to have suddenly developed a cheese allergy…

I was on team Central Purple. We started the day at the Yarn Boutique, near the corner of Bloor and Keele, where I bought this:

As well as some DPN’s. The plan is to make myself a pair of socks… because I’m some kind of crazy person (a crazy person with size 11 feet)! I’m going to try the simplest pattern I can find for my first pair.

Next stop: The Knit Cafe, which sells both yarn AND tasty treats. I had a lovely vegetarian quiche, and bought some lovely malabrigo:

I’m planning to make a hat out of it, but after winding the purple skein into a centre-pull ball, I’ve discovered that I am allergic to it after all. :( The hat will have to be for someone else, I guess. It’s a shame, because it’s just so very soft!

Then we headed to Romni Wools, which, if you look at a map of Toronto, it seems like it’d be easy to travel between the two shops, but due to streetcar re-routing, possibly due to protests, we ended up taking a scenic route down the street!

I found Romni quite overwhelming! It’s huge, and has every natural-fibre yarn you can think of (I assume… I don’t know of very many!). For someone like me, I’d have been better off deciding what I wanted to make and what yarn I’d need for it before heading in.

Still, I bought this:

I’m planning on playing with it to see if it’ll make a nice shawl. If it does, I’m going to go back and get more!

We then took another scenic streetcar ride up to Lettuce Knit where I simply could not resist buying this:

It’s soft, and even more beautiful than this picture would suggest. It is destined to become a scarf, which should be stunning with my black winter coat!

At the end of the shopping spree, most of us headed over to the Rivoli to meet up with the other four teams for merriment and prizes!

I won the “WTF WIP” prize my mitten, which I started when I got on the subway at Kipling Station. This is how much I got done over the course of the day:

Action shot:

The most frequently asked question I got about it all day was: how are you going to do the thumb? I love yarnies!

More in the next post about the amazing free stuff we got! (Look for that post either later today or tomorrow… my blog is being quite flakey today!)

What is it? Well, you sign up, are assigned a group, your group rides the TTC (knitting all the while, or possibly crocheting since I’ll be there ^_-) to four yarn shops, and all of the groups meet up at the end to compare purchases and get prizes. At least, that’s the description I’ve been given; this is my first year participating!

I will, of course, be blogging after the fact, to let you know how it went and show you what I bought! In the mean time, you can watch my Twitter feed (or the box over there on the right side of this page) for updates! I’m going to try to take pictures and tell interesting tidbits of stories throughout the day. You don’t need to sign up for Twitter in order to follow me tomorrow, just go to http://twitter.com/fantasticmio and possibly refresh the page as the day progresses, and you shouldn’t miss a thing!

Things kick off at 11am (Eastern)!

Until then, check out the progress on my “Eventually Granny Square” blanket:

It just needs the border and then I’ll have an actual finished object to show off! This one is special in that I don’t know who it’s going to be for yet. Once I’m finished I’ll do up a pattern for those who want to try it at home. If you’re new-ish to crochet and are going to try this, I suggest you learn how to make a traditional Granny Square first. (I do 2ch in the corners, and no ch stitches anywhere else, but this pattern should work just fine with any pattern that has the Granny Square look to it… in fact, ANY square that has the “granny” border on it would work)

Anyhow, it’s not a hard pattern at all; the only part I had to figure out, really, was the valleys between the squares, and it’s actually pretty easy to do. ^_^

I know there aren’t any “crochet police” so you can do whatever you want, but honestly, please feel free to actually *finish* a blanket. Any blanket.

I only bring this up because, despite the fact that you have more in-progress blankets than you can *find*, you still started two more in the last 3 days.

You know I still love you, regardless of what you do,
mio

I’ve been silent because of a combination of “working on presents for people who read the blog” and “working on getting a pattern published”.

I’ve been over-thinking about this for about a month now, and I’ve finally made a decision! I’m off work because of the G20 Summit being hosted in Toronto this weekend, so I thought I’d take the opportunity to post the pattern for the Oddly Linked Blanket.

If you’re on Ravelry, you’ll find the pattern here: Oddly Linked Blanket.

If you’re not on Ravelry, you should still be able to buy it by clicking on the button below to be taken directly to the PayPal page:

You would be paying $2.00 USD for the pattern for the blanket. I’d say it’s an easy-intermediate level blanket, with one tricky part that is clearly (I hope!) explained using both text and lots of pictures.

Once you get the hang of the special stitch, the blanket works up quickly! Use any smooth, solid coloured yarn with an appropriate hook for best results. I think a variegated yarn would work well, but one with long runs of colours would work best.

One last note: I know that this pattern looks like it might have a lot of ends to weave in, but it has exactly as many as you’d expect with that many colour changes; so 2 ends per stripe of colour.

This morning I started trying some of the patterns. Now, this is a book made up of crochet border patterns (obviously), and while each pattern also has a “in rows” version, they are primarily meant to be worked in the round. Specifically, around *something*.

I wanted to get started right away, though, and I didn’t want to have to fuss with the math of getting the right number of sc stitches around a motif, or for that matter, wasting time making the motif to begin with (before you say it: most of the motifs I have worked up already are not square, and would have lead to even more math. Time’s a tickin’!)

I tried the first border I had bookmarked (#26), using the “in rows” version and felt that I didn’t really get a good feel for the border as half of the stitches were backwards. Normally this wouldn’t be a big deal to me, but this was a stitch of particular interest because I’d never heard of it before.

So… there’s a border I want to try, I want to do it in the round, and flat, and don’t feel like making a motif of some sort first. What did I do?

Thank you chainless foundation sc!

Someone on Twitter asked me once (and I appologize for not answering your question there, I didn’t see it until just recently!), how I come up with design ideas. Apparently the answer is: laziness and happy accidents. ^_^

Here’s a preview:

It looks very different from the blanket, mostly because I’ve gone up a hook size (from 5mm to 6mm) and down a yarn size (from 4 – worsted to 3 – light)

The right-hand increase side looks lovely

The left-hand increase side, less so:

I have an idea to sort that all out, though!