Creative Space Crochet Club 2011

 

The craft project of choice that I took on my surprise ‘get a bug in your blood – get a free holiday’ trip was the Crochet Club 2011 Mystery Blanket – basically because it was to hand and was in a little storage box.  B loves putting things in carrier bags when we go anywhere so was slightly put out when we left for the hospital and I wanted to keep my crochet box au natural.  (I loath to admit it but he gets it from his mother – ‘Do you want a carrier bag for your knitting?’ ‘No.’ ‘It would be better in one.’ ‘I managed to get it here without one.’ ‘We’ve got this one, it’s a nice one!’ ‘NOOOOOOOOOO.’ – well you get the idea fortunately B has learned not to be so insistent but the urge to bag things still lingers.)

Now I didn’t feel like I got that much done considering I was in for six and a half days but with popping our for a wedding, visitors and general chatting with fellow inmates, I mean holidaymakers, in retrospect I don’t think I did too bad..

I had real trouble with one of the half circles and had to undo several rows several times.  When the second one was a doddle and I analysed the first it turned out that the problem was me, I had five spokes in the centre instead of four.  Since the outside measurement was the same, due to some severe tweaking I’ve left it.  (The old adage about it not being spotted by a man on a galloping horse applying.)

I waited to do the outside of the semi circles until last Friday when I was feeling more compos mentis as I thought it was doing to be really, really hard – it turned out to be so simple and the string of interlocked circles just curved round with a simple row, mostly of double crochet (single crochet – US) either side.

On Sunday when I came to block the pieces before sewing another two strips together I encountered a problem.  I believe it’s spotable even to the non crocheter…

After checking the measurements of the straight piece and the zig zag it transpired I was only 1 cm out so after contemplating re-crocheting the zig zag I bascially stretched it until it fit – it would have to have been stretched a tad anyway so I just made it a tadddddddd.  This resulted in these…

which brought me up to the end of May’s instructions.

We have now entered into the realms of June…

and am up to adding to the second semi circle…

and this would be why I don’t do much knitting intarsia (colour knitting but not true fairisle which by law only has two colours on one row).  I find it really, really messy.  I’ve tried these…

I’ve tried wrapping it into tiny balls and even wrapping it round my thumb and little finger into small skeins that pull out from the middle and solve all this but nothing works well other than cutting the yarn off into lengths that you can just pull out of the surrounding mess but as you don’t know how much you are going to need that’s not really a viable option.

But hey, it looks like I will get it finished before the end of the month – famous last words!

Other Creative Spaces can be found here.