Sunday 10 June 2012

Fragile Heart and the Leap Year Blanket

Eeeeek!  Its been a month since I blogged - time for a catch up. 

During the first half of the month I joined Evelyn from the The Soaring Sheep for another hand holding shawl and lace knit a long.  This was my first shawl make in laceweight yarn.  I love lace work but have decided I'll stick to sockweight yarn for shawls in the future as I couldnt work up any speed with laceweight on 4.5mm needles.  Used several 100 beads on this shawl - they look great.  Took 2 weeks to finish and I'm really pleased with it.  The cast off used a picot bind off which was another first.  The ending was a bit nerve wracking as I was down to only a couple of yards left on the skein - glad I only went for one repeat of each section.  If I make it again I'll do the stocking stitch body rather than the garter stitch.  Going to treat myself at some point to some blocking wires and pins to block it properly but here are the unblocked pics





Since completing the shawl I've put down my knitting needles and moved to my crochet hook instead.  Despite starting the year full of enthusiasm and being way ahead with my Leap Year Blanket (crochet a square every day of the Leap Year) I'd fallen way behind.  At the beginning of June I was 50 squares behind so set myself a challenge to make 50 filler squares over the Jubilee holiday.  They are all completed :-) and I've now made it to 152 completed squares (its day 161 today so slipping again!!).  With so many squares it was time to come up with a plan for how to join them.  I want to make a blanket to cover our bed.  We've got a divan so I want the blanket to reach right over the sides of the bed to cover the horrible blue check divan base.  Thats given me an 82" square to work towards.  Decided to make nine 27" squares and join them together 3x3.  So far I have joined together a group of squares to make the first 27" square.  As I crochetted with scrap yarn of varying different weights and followed numerous patterns my individual squares are very ramdom sizes its therefore hard to slot them together to fit into a 27" square.  As time goes on I'll have to make some more calculated sized squares to fill the missing gaps.  I think 200 individual squares will be more than enough to cover our bed so the remaining 166 squares will be used to make a blanket for each of the girls beds and maybe a couple of cushion covers.

My squares so far :-)

The first joined together square.  Josie loves the big stained glass window one and wants her blanket with just those.

For once I feel quite settled working on one project at a time rather than having numerous WiP's on the go!!!  I shall continue with my blanket until my enthusiasm wanes again but hopefully by that point I'll have got ahead.

Hope everyone is well in the blogging world xxx