The next four squares on the Granny Square Sampler afghan are all flowers or flower-ish. First is the African Flower Granny Square. I had a lot of trouble with this one for some reason -- maybe I thought it was supposed to be more puffy than it turned out, I don't know. It certainly needed a lot of blocking for the petals to show up well, as otherwise it was almost completely scrunched up when I tied it off. Rather pretty, though.
Week 8's square is the Sunburst, with directions from Blair to make two of them that look "quite different from each other color-wise". I confess that I'm not really wild about this square for some reason -- it's just sort of meh for me. Part of it may be its openness, which would make an afghan a bit drafty, I suspect. But I did succeed in making the two completely different from each other, there is that!
(I didn't notice until long after I'd finished it that I accidentally made one of them even draftier than it would have been!)
The square for Week 9 is a novelty, the Three-Dimensional Flower. There were to be four in my photo, instead of the requested three, because I had a lot of trouble with this square and realized quite early on that the first one was going to be a dud. One of the mistakes I will own up to fully (besides being sure that I had taken a photo of all four and finding just now that I hadn't), that of somehow copying down the last round incorrectly and thus having a round of single-crochets instead of doubles (!). The others maybe are just my not quite understanding the directions, or not knowing how I was supposed to work a maneuver that more experienced crocheters do. Where the instructions say to "work into the stem of the SC in the previous round," I interpreted this as what I later discovered is called "into the back post" because the footnote in the instructions explain that "the stem of an sc refers to the actual part of the single crochet stitch which attaches the stitch to the ch loop or space made in a previous round" and I, being an English major first and crocheter far, far second, interpreted "stem which attaches" as sort of tree-like, stem being not the same as root, thus --
This photo gives you, should you need it, some clarification of where the catch stitch should go. It amuses me -- now -- to know that my attempts to reverse-engineer the thing ended up using what I was supposed to do in the first place.
I'm not sure now why I was so determined to get it to fluff up, when I wasn't that wild about the fluffiness in the first place, but there it is. Human nature is very mysterious. Anyway, my first attempt is apparently already back in the scrap bag, my second square (with pink petals) has something not-quite-right about it, my third square (with purple petals) is pretty much what the thing is supposed to look like (!), and my fourth square (on the far right), is the first square done again properly!
I think I like it a bit better with 4 DCs in the first petals, actually, not 3. This is what I did on the third square, the one with purple petals, then I thought I should try it according to the actual pattern. In this yarn at least, the extra stitch makes it more of a kind with the outer round of petals, which have 5 DCs but have a little more space to enjoy them.
Rather impulsively in the midst of all this, I decided to dig out the four packets of Kool-Aid that have been languishing in the back of the cupboard for some time, and dye some of the white yarn I have in the bag for this sampler. The wool is a partial ball of Dalegarn Falk, in color 0020 unbleached white, or "ubleket hvit" if you want to take a crack at the Norwegian. The "Blue Raspberry Lemonade" is not only a rather noxious shade of blue but makes the yarn feel stiff and artificial, but that is the only one that is not wholly successful.
And last in the flower sequence is the Popcorn Flower Granny Square, with the assignment to use the ground color (I chose white, since I have so much of it) as the border on one. This square was a walk in the park compared to the previous one! I did decide after the first one to modify the last round a bit -- you can see on the first one how it pulls in so that it isn't quite square. I actually must be getting more confident with crocheting, as I said to myself, "Oh, that needs more height on some of the clusters in the background! and I think I know what to do!" My revised last round has the first cluster being 3 DCs as in the pattern, but instead of all DCs the second is 3 HDCs, then 3 DCs, and the corner is 3 TCs, ch2, 3 TCs -- this worked perfectly. After I took this photo, I picked out the last round and did it over again. (Note the Kool-Aid colors! Though it looks a bit more subtle worked in this small amount next to the darker "Black Cherry," the "Cherry" is vividly scarlet.)
All of this crochet is making me long to knit something, though.
And in cross-stitch news, I finished the "Froth and Bubble" sampler! but since I used only two initials, I didn't quite like the way the spacing turned out -- the gap between looks too big and the margins too pinched. So I'm going to pick it out and re-do it -- not as onerous as it sounds, partly because it's just simple lettering and won't be more than a few hours' stitching, and partly because I've enjoyed this so thoroughly that I hardly want it to end ...
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