Too much frogging going on

I seem to be hiccuping a bit, not much going on at the finishing front here!

Two are two biiig wips hidden in my closet, one of which really hurt my shoulder last year, so it's hibernating a bit.  And I tried all kinds of other things, that doesn't work like I want it to.

I saw a really beautiful shawl, the Dragon Wing/ Lizard Shawl  by Jasmin Räsänen...ooh, I wanted to start immediately, and did so...and couldn't find joy.

I think it might have been the ridges.

...I frogged it here. 

I started the Monsoon Shawl twice now (no, correction, the yarn changed twice...) - first in dark navy Vinnis Serina - which didn't show the stitch pattern.  The I added Ivory.  Then I frogged and added jewel colours.  Then I frogged,

And started again, in the new Moya Caresse.  The colours worked beautifully...but I didn't like the pattern.

(Love the shawl, not the pattern?  Yes, that can happen).

But - frogged

Then I had coffee with a hooky friend who made this most beautiful scarf/shawl - I might have been a bit overcome with admiration, because she gave it to me!  Her work is always so beautiful and I'm truly honoured to show this off:

Simply Crochet saved my crochet drought with this little amigurumi packet and I quickly could make a little bat for my batman-besotted youngest one :-D

Mouse ears...on a bat?

It was a simple, easy pattern, even when doing it late at night by a fire!

And now I started with Cherry Heart's Painted Roses Throw.  This was why I bough the Moya Caresse, after I've seen the colours.  I really wanted to try in old, faded, vintage colours.  There might be one or two brighter ones in my selection already,  but things look promising!

Here goes...hoping to be finished by Christmas!

A tiles-inspired blanket

And finished is the Tiles Blanket!

Freshly off the block

This Tiles Blanket was started impulsively and grew quickly, until...April happened, which is always a huge, busy month for us, with my sis coming to visit, Ironman, 361 and all kinds of things happening, and bags with crochet projects in them are taken off the table, to a shelf, to a wardrobe, to the back of the wardrobe...until the day you clear up and Oh My Soul here's the Tiles Blanket!

Only to realise the clear-up also included two boxes of yarn that might have contained the yarn needed to finish this...and I didn't want to buy more...so it ended up a bit smaller that planned, but exactly the right size for a wheelchair user, or a baby, so all ended well.

While joining (with wip stitch) I realised:

1) I should have used join-as-you-go, because the white row plus join was now a bit wide

2) The white row had 4 stitches per wide grey space, but that was one too many for the join and then it ruffled. 

But I had already joined two strip of 5 squares, so no unraveling was going to happen, and it really isn;t the end of the world.  

And then I love borders, so I couldn't wait to grab Around The Corner Crochet Borders to choose one, eventually deciding on nr 34 without the last row of SC.
(Ok, I actually lost yarn chicken ;-)
(And it's grey, because that was the only colour yarn left, and it worked out quite fine!)

I really love how the colours worked out.  I did play around with 2 or 3 more, but settled on the 4 used here (and now I'm wondering how this would in hand-dyed Vinnis Nikkim!).

Off the blocks (yes, the acrylic did block nicely) it travelled al over the house, draped here and folded there...

Outside on the stoep table

It nearly stayed in my house , but it was a promised blanket and I'm happy that it already arrived at Maak 'n Verskil, from where I hope it will make the recipient happy as well.  

Early-morning light is the best

A beautiful, easy pattern, nice yarn and pretty colours makes for an enjoyable project that I might even duplicate at some stage!

All the info on my Ravelry page.

On the hook, at last, and randomising stripes

After nine long weeks of enforced hooky rest, the result of intense Elise Shawl-hooking, there are small signs of a recovering shoulder/elbow.  Let me not count my yarn balls too quickly, though!

So I'm slowly picking up work again, and first priority is my little one's Tommie-blanket, a summer throw for his bedroom.  Just a few rows at a time, so as not to overwork the fragile right arm ;-)

One row, and another...

Immediately I was asked about my random colours, and as usual, it is not random.  This Gemini mos wants randomised order (see the Project Bohemia summer throw).

First off, I'm using all my summery yarn stash: Vinnis Nikkim/Bambi/Serina, I Love yarn - Imagine, Sublime Egyptian Cotton, Rico Baby Cotton, Unlabeled Yarn That I Can't Identify etc...

The base colour is Vinnis Bambi "Blue-Gray", which you'll see in every third row.  Now...

I started with Base.

Then

Warm - Neutral - Cool
Base
Cool - Navy - Warm

Base
Warm - Neutral - Cool
Base
Cool - Navy - Warm

...ad infinitum until The End.

(I might have switched some around resulting in Warm - Navy - Cool, but it's not the end of the world)

But...Red is obvious, so it must be balanced and every 8th row is thus Red.

Navy is also semi-obvious and therefor every 8th row...balancing with the Neutral, you see :-)

And although Yellow is not strictly every 8th, it is more or less.

I'm not losing my mind, I'm keeping it together and furiously counting rows and colours!  And the randomness will be balanced and keep my colour-OCDness happy. 

Off I go, I hear a cocktail being mixed in the kitchen ;-)

Cheap & Cheerful Winners

Our Cheap & Cheerful Challenge has finished!

What a joy to see what these ladies came up with, to show that even some of the cheapest yarns around CAN be used to produce a beautiful blanket.  

Here's the info on the background of Cheap & Cheerful, and my own contribution

and these were the three winners:

Helen's snowflake blanket

Helen chose to work with Chick, the very cheap supermarket acrylic that I also chose, in two blues, grey and white.  Upon finishing the blue and grey motifs, she realised that gaps between these were too large for her liking and  - given the restricted colour choices of Chick - came up with the plan to dye some her acrylic yarn (easier said than done!!).  Google and YouTube came to her aid and she added the brownish motif with white center - and it was as if the blanket was designed to look like that.

I love the unusual colour combination and the handdyed effect on the brown.  Plus the snowflakes brighten everything up.

A beautiful blanket and clever solution.

Brilliant Mommy's stripey C2C

Everybody's seen the Corner to Corner blanket, and many have been making it, right? There have been some beautiful variations, but you haven't seen it all until Helene's came along.

Three colourways of variegated Pullskein scream at each other...until you work it together, alternating after each row. Then it absolutely work, and blend in, the one with the next, into a harmonious, pastel rainbow.

These colours had Ons Hekel swooning.

Lara's chevron

Lara used the same almost shock tactic with her chevron blanket.  Who would put red and pink together with ...brownish and greyish? And yet the colours and stitch patterns mellow together, making the photo jump out from the rest.  

See what can be done?

There's no reason to think you can't make a beautiful item because you don't have great yarn.  Sure, working with Vinnis, I Love Yarn, Malabrigo, Rowan makes it a lot easier, but you can also get by with what you can find at the local co-op or supermarket.

I was so happy to see these three and the other entries.  And all 20 will make a difference as part of the Make A Difference charity, to be distributed come Winter 2016.

Well done ladies, be proud!  And enjoy your gifts packs :-)

(Thank you to Yarn in a Barn, Dalena White of Cape Wools SA, Brilliant Mommy for sponsoring some prices, as well as yarn donors!)

A Tommie Blanket

Our Tommie-cat has died.

Suffice to say that there are currently very hostile feelings between us and that I'm counting the weeks until my kids can again safely ride their bikes in our (usually) very quiet, single-lane street in our (usually) very quiet residential estate.

 Tommie was my (okay, my son's) very first kitten. 

We got her as a rescue from the local SPCA for his 7th birthday after he's been pleading for months.  Although she was his, she was also mine, my constant companion during the mornings at home, following me and calling me if she didn't immediately see me, fighting with my hands when I folded laundry until I had to cage her with the laundry basket, walking round and round the edge of the bath, waiting for me to get out of the water (she fell in twice :-) ).  

She was such a bloody oulike cat.

But.  

The Unveiling of the Tombstone (it's a Thing in South Africa)
We planted a katjiepiering (gardenia) and catnip in the zinc bath.
He wrote a letter that was cellotaped to a stick and planted in there as well. 

So last week terrible Friday I started sorting my Vinnis and other cotton and bamboo yarn stash, putting together colours to use in a month or so when I would start working on summer blankets for the boys.  I decided to make a simple Granny Stripe for the Little One, as he already has a smallish Granny Square blanket.  As it is when sorting yarn and making Big Decisions like this, I thought I'd just start with a row or two, just to get an idea...you know...

And then the Horrible Afternoon happened, and we had a Cat Funeral, and took the boys to the beach to get them away, and I diverted my Little One's attention by telling him about his new blanket that I started that morning, and that he could remember Tommie when he cuddled under it and by the end of the day I was ten rows away and made promises of a crocheted kitty appliquéd on the blanket.  

SO here I am, hooking away on this one, shoving other plans and projects to the side. As usual, there is a Formula to my colour sequencing :-P

Meanwhile, I'll be scouring the universe for crochet kitty patterns to appliqué - feel free to point me in the right direction!

Tearfully, 

Stel

Done! A Cheap & Cheerful Blanket

At last I'm finished with a blanket that shouldn't have taken me more than a few days!

(But alas, I don't have the attention span).

A couple of months ago I launched a Cheap & Cheerful Challenge on my FB group and explained a bit more in this post.

Basically, it boiled down to showing that you can use dirt cheap acrylic yarn, but still hook something pretty; that cheap yarn doesn't have to equate to shrill, ugly colour combinations.  This challenge was not about the quality of the yarn, but about using the cheap supermarket variety, or worst case - that only yarn which is available to you.

So off I skipped to my local Checkers where they just unpacked the winter's load of Chick yarn.   This is typically the colour ranges for this cheapie, a 100g DK @ R20 (roughly £1, €1.43 or $1.58 today. Toldya it was cheap).

Stop street red or maroon?
(No, this is not marsala)

Dusky pink or sugary baby pink (this is a hot favourite at church bazaars)

Blues: cobalt, denimish, baby

Also available were brilliant white, pitch black, lemony yellow, light minty green, emerald and primary green, and some variegated combinations of the above.  And grey. 

I took the grey (let's be fancy and call it silvery grey), plus denim(ish) blue, a ball of emerald, plus the blue, emerald and something else variegated.  The variegated was dismissed to the donation bag after 2 or 3 rows of trying it out, and with it went the emerald.  So that left me with the silver-grey and denim, which suited me well, as I was after a simple look, simple colours, and something suitable or a man (the idea was to donate these blankets to the Maak 'n Verskil group who will distribute to various charities again).

Starting out my C&C, trusty Prym nr 4.5 to get it done swiftly. 

I decided to wing it, aiming for a basic stripey blanket that I made up as I went along. One silver-grey between blues became two, became four and so on, until I'd reach a midway point and reverse back.  

Starting out and it's looking fine. 

Oh wait, here:
*dragging photo from bottom of post*

There's the pattern repeat - add another 8 of silver-grey, and then three of 16 before I turned back

As this was a simple blanket to hook, I could easily tag it along and it was particularly useful during cold road trips!

A pit stop at a local favourite pizza place in the mountain.

It was also useful during cold nights in front of the tv! 

Tommie cat also took a liking to it

And then, after taking on and finishing numerous other  projects, it was done.  Even so, it took me another bloody week to just sit down and get to the ends!

 I didn't make it too big, only suitable for a lap blanket (useful for wheelchair users or to use while sitting), or then for a baby.

This photo might be upside down.
But
It's fine.  The blanket measures 105 x 118 cm.

Done!

A manly grey and blue granny stripe.

I haven't worked with Chick ever, before this challenge, but have used other acrylics numerous times. Truth be told - it wasn't that bad to work with this yarn, in the sense that it produces a neat, tight stitch and it didn't split (which is a common occurence with the nicest cotton yarns...  :-( and I could live with the squeak as I knew it was coming.

That said - I won't work with it again. Not for any of the above reasons...but that's a story for another day ;-)

But here'a a useful blanket that someone who needs it can use, and it won't hurt your eyes.  And that was the purpose of the exercise.

Next post: some of the blankets that came in .

More beanies, blanket work and new yarn

We're a week into the new school term after three weeks of a super-lazy winter holiday.  The season has already turned here, the first blossoms have appeared on the fruit trees, but we have also just seen the first light dusting of winter snow on the mountains and suddenly it's the coldest it has been the past couple of months!

Winter = beanie time, so I set myself a target of a beanie a day for one week, which would then be delivered to one of the many Madiba Day projects country-wide.  The idea was to work quickly, with thicker yarn, so I tried out this Kartopu Cotton Spray yarn, a beautiful, smooth cotton/acrylic blend.

Although the yarn was lovely to work with, it didn't really deliver on the colour promise
and looked like vanilla ice cream with 100's & 1000's that melted :-0

See ?  Oh well, it is soft and snuggly and will keep someone warm.

While I had my tidy little plan of 7 beanies, my dear darling husband promised his associate office in Cape Town a BAGfull of beanies for their Madiba Day contribution to a home for disabled children in Gugulethu...and he juuust remember to tell me with a few days to go.  Luckily, the helpful hooky ladies  of George and some in Cape Town heard my sudden, hysterical plea for help, and after the weekend I had these to send off:

To this was added a bag from my CT friends and together we delivered more than
the hastily-made promise :-D

Holidays also means roadtrippin' time, and we went down the N2 to a farm stall complex (comprising La Bella Deli, Die Rooi Aalwyn, Bali Trading and a couple more) outside Riversdale, where I spotted these beauties:

A cotton pouch/purse 

I totally loved this beanie, but the yarn -though beautiful - is quite hard and scratchy

Granny throw for your chair?

Beautiful cushion covers (and a clever plan for all those loose motifs)

 While my boys were off hunting (we had one family hunting weekend and one only for The Men - that is the dads and cousins) - I worked on the Cheap & Cheerful blanket.  

All of us had success!  My two boys and their cousins shot their first blesbok - very proud of their contribution to the deep freeze - and I at last finished with the blanket, with only a few ends still staring me in the eye.

Early morning hooking in bed

I must confess that I really had to motivate myself to complete this one! For all that I do understand people preferring or being limited to this type of acrylic, it really isn't a joy to work with.  That said, I do hope to show with this little challenge that cheap yarn does not have to be nasty looking.

I was also treated to a sample of Moya Yarn's new Bulky Plush, a thick, soft cotton!

These came in the mail - the soft, muted colours perfect for a prezzie that I need to hook up quickly
for MIL's birthday one of these days.

Of course I had to try it out immediately. I love to sit and hook over a coffee, and took my hooky with me to this tea garden in the mountains. When my boys took off with the proprietor to chase away baboons at a nearby house, I took my chance to get in a few rows :-)

Hooky with a view at Over the Mountain

I might have halfway caught up with my laziness at posting now...

I fell smack bang into the trap of Instagram, when I KNEW that it would be an abyss of utterly beautiful images on the one hand, and the ease and convenience of a quick upload plus three words and a couple of hashtags on the other (but have you seen the lists of hashtags getting longer and longer? It looks more like advertisements that anything else).  So after 7, 8 months there I decided to drastically cut the accounts I follow and clear my feed a bit (and the blog feed!) and I must follow up my own posts there with a blogpost here, because that's the other thing I realised - I miss writing about the process, the idea and the progress and the mistakes made and lessons learnt until the end.*  I also miss reading about other bloggers' processes**, because more and more we see beautiful images, styled beyond belief, but less about the how and the why. And that is why I, for one, started to blog - to document my own, and read and learn from others.   

*And as I write and want to add labels, I realise there are no labels because I forgot to write about the Cheap and Cheerful Blanket's progress!  A next post then.

**Sandra of Cherry Heart wrote a recent post about her first project - and she thinks of it as a failure :-) and that's what I really liked about Blogland from the beginning - to see how and what others learnt, because that's how I then learnt. That might be what got me thinking.

So there.  Off to the couch I go to end with the ends of ends of the C&C.  I'm still not saying anything about the Summer Throw, notice?  It will come :-D  Ends an'all. 

Cheap & Cheerful Crochet

We need to talk about privilege.

Allow me some ramblin' here, because it's been sitting at the back of my mind for quite while now.  It came to the fore again this past week as I followed Jack Monroe blog about her Live Below The Line Challenge - surviving on £1 a day for five days - as she used to do, scraping together balanced, nutritious meals for something like 17p for dinner, 12p for breakfast, using up the last wilted spring onion in her soup, diluting the juice from the canned peaches for a drink, stretching that one can over five days.

And yet we (I) can get so blasé over the origin of our coffee beans, the presentation of our food, how predator-friendly our lamb must be.

Privilege. 

In South Africa we have an ongoing, raging debate over (white) privilege (e.g. ) and the realisation whether you were/are privileged.  

I didn't grow up in an affluent home. Many months my parents were in their overdraft (privilege) within a week of payday.  Yet, there was no question that I would not attend university (privilege), albeit with the help of bank loans (privilege).  And once these were paid off by my dad's pension payout (privilege), I could continue with postgraduate studies where my Hons. and MSc degrees came basically free, courtesy of bursaries, research grants and the like (privileges galore). 

And then one (I) become so used to be studying/working in this milieu, that you (I) can forget that you're actually part of but a small group.  Same when you start travelling, or working as a registered professional. Your (my) privileges become so part of your (my) background, that you don't even realise it anymore. 

For me that realisation came when we returned to South Africa from Aus (privilege) and chose to buy a house  (privilege) in a less affluent area than where we previously lived.  We did this to afford me remaining a stay-at-home-mom (privilege), but still being able to buy the house we wanted, at half the price and triple the stand size compared to where we looked before.  There, many people I met weren't university (post)graduates.  Travel wasn't a taken-for-granted annual occurrence.  So very quickly my casual references to coffee shop this or Canada that or bought such and such or Scotland/HongKong/Nairobi what not became much more guarded, more thoughtful to where and when it may be raised.

Privilege.

While the more affluent acquaintances would raise their eyebrows at our choice of neighbourhood, choice of lifestyle :-0

Now, raking this topic all the way over to hooky - this can so easily happen over a crochet hook and a yarn of wool.  I'll be the first to admit that I do love my German Prym hook (not available in SA, but a very common buy at Kaufhof).  I love pure cotton Vinnis yarn, pure merino, or bamboo, something laced with silk,.  I go glassy-eyed at the sight of Malabrigo at my LYS, or Katia Cotton Jeans, or linen (priviliges ad infinitum)...but I will not shy away from a nice acrylic - and there ARE nice acrylics.  

Managing Ons Hekel, I came to realise that there many hookers who can't afford the lovely natural yarns exploding on the South African market, or who can't access it from their country towns/farms (our postal system is in a shambles).  Now, when you are constantly bombarded by others enthusing about the above, you can either strive to get your hands on one of these, or begin to feel resentful about the fact that so many other are boasting about it, or begin to feel embarrassed to show off your work, as you don't deem it to be of the same quality/to be as pretty.

And these are all valid, true bona fide remarks I have read on the group or received in my inbox.

Privilege dampening the experiences of others.

That is not something I would have wanted to read, that the joy of one would lead to the withdrawal of another.

It's all about the way one expresses oneself, isn't it?

Therefore I'll take even more care of my use of the term "squeak", because even though I might hate the feel of Mirage, it might also be the only yarn another woman can get in her town. Or someone else might actually love it.

Be a bit more mindful about the way I talk about yarns.

So, hand in  hand with our ongoing discussion on colour (the use of, the combinations of) on Ons Hekel, I decided the launch the Cheap & Cheerful Challenge, a challenge to make something real pretty from cheap acrylic yarn. To show that you CAN make a beautiful blanket with Charity. To show that you CAN avoid horrid colour combinations when you work with Chick. That it is not the end of the world if you choose to /are only able to work with Pullskein.

Off I went to my local Checkers supermarket to buy some Chick and this is more or less how far my own contribution is.

Just two colours, grey and denim blue

I promised a prize to the best contribution on the condition that to qualify the blanket then be donated to the Maak 'n Verskil group (Make a Difference).  I've already had pledges towards the prize and quite a few blankies have been started.  Looking forward to see what comes up!


Disclaimer -  I know that not everybody will agree with my train of thought and/or links between these...that's also fine -  the thought is mine.

PS (ed.) - I want to add on to Ale's comment below - she's residing in the neighbouring Mozambique; much less developed than RSA, much less availability of everything.  My South Africa has very different levels of living - you can experience this country as totally First World, or else totally, hopelessly Third World.  Within three, four km of my house there are squatter shacks, bush sleepers - but also houses with more bathrooms than people to use it.  There are people selling household stuff to get money to buy food, there's a guy driving the latest Ferrari.

What I'm saying is - don't feel guilty about buying great quality, expensive yarn...four balls of aforementioned Katia came to my house this week.  I'm just seeing this against the context of life around me, the things we can get so smug and boastful about - is it really that important?  It's not a bloody achievement.  

Just a privilege. 

When my Mzansi makes blankets

Last year some time, Carolyn Steyn was challenged to make 67 blankets for Mandela Day.  She responded by organising an event that yesterday tripled the Guinness World Record for the largest crocheted blanket, covered the terraces in front of Pretoria's Union Buildings and aim to hand out thousands of handmade blankets this winter!

In a week that South Africa was not the happiest place, this was something good to focus on.

Thousands of knitters and crocheters had worked on beautiful blankets, to give away to strangers, to people in need, in crisis.  Everyone who has made a blanket knows that you don't do it in a just a few days, and that, for me, is the greatness of this event, that thousands of people had been willing to put in the time and the effort, from grannies to school girls, corporate yuppies to the Sharks rugby team, this is was a collective effort that makes one happy.

When my Mzansi makes blankets, we go big. 

Today in The Times. Photo: Peter Morey

It started with unpacking and stitching the blankets together
Photo: Carolyn Steyn

Breakfast tv was there!

My friend Kotie quickly walked over, as this is almost her back yard

How amazing is this!  Filling up the terraces.
Photo: Peter Morey

Fantastic aerial view of the Union Buildings and gardens
Photo: Peter Morey

The blankets are still being counted, as some were received yesterday on site and more will be received until July.

I wish wish wish I could have been there!

Visit the FB Page for 67 Blankets for Nelson Mandela Day here.

The hellohart team posted a beautiful selection of 67 blankets plus their favourites.

And remember our yarnbomb of ±630 blankets at the Voortrekker Monument last year, plus other record efforts in South Africa?

My sisi's blanket for Laura

While I'm slowly nearing the end of my summer throw, I can at least brag with my sisi's Elmer Blanket.

She's good at making beautiful gifts for her in-laws, my sisi, and this one was made for her SIL Laura:

Perfectionist, disciplined - look at the neat stitches.  I can only dream ;-)

This was her first project done in Colours of Grace, of which she bought a bagful last year during the Yarn Indaba, and upon starting, immediately ordered more.

Colours of Grace is a 10 ply, hand-dyed organic cotton, resulting in a beautiful, slightly mottled effect, especially when when using a dense stitch pattern like she did. 

A simple join in Natural

She made one square per ball, using 28 colours

"Here it is"
View from above

Oreo the cat also tried to claim it :-)

Elmer Blanket pattern can be found at Little Tin Bird's blog

A last view in the harbour before to its new owner:

Who can spot the Irishman? Clever man - he wasn't going to let this beauty blow into the water!

Colours of Grace can be ordered from Hilda at Yarn in a Barn, who delivers internationally.
Note that some of the current colours will be discontinued, but a new set will be released soon - we're looking forward to see the new colours!