Ripple Baby Blanket Pin.012

I have finished my second crochet project! Hurrah! And you'll be pleased to hear that it didn't take the 9 months or so that the first one did (although it is a fair bit smaller!).

A rippled baby blanket (sorry not a great picture).

Unfortunately it did take a bit longer than it should have as I hit a few problems along the way, resulting in unpicking hours of work.. sob sob.. I literally was finishing it off in the car on the way to see my friend for her baby shower! It took about a month altogether, though the pattern asked for 55 rows and I was a few short.

You get the ripple effect by using increasing and decreasing stitches that sort of force your crochet into a wave like pattern. It's a very cool effect!

In the end it wasn't really much of a surprise for my friend had seen my half a dozen 'ripple crochet blanket' pins on pinterest!

I used a tutorial from Daisy Cottage Designs (Pin below). However as a beginner crocheter(?) I found it really difficult to make heads or tails of. I'm still not quite sure where I went wrong with interpreting her instructions, as I had lots of chain stitch left over, and an odd amount of stitches. In the end I sort of improvised and fortunately it worked!

If you want to give the ripple blanket a go I would recommend following the pattern from Very Pink Knits. There's a video so you can see how to the stitches and do it along with her. I wish I had found this pattern before I started with the one above, I would have saved myself a lot of stress! Be aware than in any American tutorials they use the term 'double crochet' for what we in the UK would call a 'Treble'. It's also important to maintain the same tension throughout, I tend to crochet quite tightly (something I need to work on) but I got a bit lazy towards the end and was crocheting looser. This resulted in a very wonky blanket, and I had to unpick about 8 rows and redo them all!

For anyone wanting to learn how to crochet, check out Girlybunches tutorials on youtube. It's much easier to get head round it by seeing someone do it than looking at pictures etc. And she goes through all the basics as well as more advanced stitches and projects.

Hmm.. what shall I crochet next? Keep posted for the furniture upcycling me and the hubster are currently working on...

Hello again! Pin.011

So it's been a while since I posted on here, over a year ago in fact... Around March last year I started full time work and just found I didn't have the time to dedicate to maintaining this blog. In my spare time I wanted to be living life and doing things and started resenting the time I spent glued to the laptop editing/uploading blog posts!

I still have a desire to be creative and learn new skills though, and for the last 8 months or so I have been making my first crochet blanket (see pic below modelled by my kitty Pandora).

It took ages and required a huge deal of patience, but I'm chuffed with the result. Kudos to my sister in law for teaching me how to do a granny square, and tutorials such as:

Girlybunches and Knotyournanascrochet (pin below)

It was the first crochet project I had ever done, and what started out as me just practising turned into quite a lengthy project. I could have made it smaller, but I deliberately kept making more squares as I wanted a blanket that would actually be useful after all that time spent on it! It's quite a simple project really as the granny squares only use two different stitches, the chain stitch and the treble stitch. I used a single crochet stitch to join the squares together but there are lots of other ways to join them.

If you're interested in learning how to crochet I would recommend looking at Girlybunches tutorials on Youtube. There are lots of good blogs out there that tell you how to crochet but I found it so much easier watching a video.

I'm currently working on another crochet project but that's hush hush for now as it will be a present for someone.. It has to be finished by the end of this month though so the pressure's on! I'll post again when it's finished so watch this space...