A Bluestocking Knits

Thoughts on the Basic (Baby) Blanket

This, at last, is the "Basic Blanket" from Simple Crochet for Cherished Babies by Jane Davis, which I have to say, was an utter pain most of the time I spent on it, but is very pretty now that it's finished and draped artfully over the arm of a sofa.  I had searched for blanket or afghan patterns that called for 10 balls of Jaeger Baby Merino and would be fairly quick to make, and this seemed to fit the bill perfectly, but ten balls were not enough by at least one, and I spent quite a lot of time having to figure out not only the instructions themselves but how to arrange it so that I could get as much of the pattern worked with almost every inch of the ten balls I had.

Strangely, although my gauge came out noticeably larger than given in the book, with the same weight yarn and my usual 1-size-smaller hook, the finished measurement of the panel was smaller than given.  How can that be?

There really should be a more-clear photo of what this blanket is supposed to look like when laid flat. I suppose that this --

-- which is the photo from the book, is clear enough once you've already made the thing, but before I got to that point, I heartily wished to see it more fully.  (What does the seam look like? for example ...)

I found out early on from reviews on Amazon that a lot of people have had difficulties with a number of patterns in this book, so perhaps I'm a bit more salty than I would have been if I thought it was just me.  I suppose I can figure out that if the instructions say "weave in end after row 11" that I'm supposed to break off the yarn at that point, or that if it says "sew the panels together" that I'm supposed to make a second panel, but it doesn't say so at all.  But I was mystified by the instruction "Work row 8 along the top and bottom edges of the blanket" -- it's multi-directional, so which edges are the top and bottom?!

This edging, by the way, is simply begging for a chart, but I am not at that stage yet, myself.  (Laura herself came in not long after I'd hidden the blanket-in-progress but not my attempt at a chart.  "What's this?" she asked, "some weird code??")

After trying to puzzle out the directions, then trying to figure out from the photo what was meant in the directions, I came up with these alternate instructions for certain rows, with my choices and some clarifications in boldface. Note that in the main body of the panel, the initial ch3 does not count as a stitch -- you are making loops in which to anchor the edging.  (This, if I remember correctly, is not what the general instructions say at the beginning of the book.)  The initial ch3 in the border, however, does count as a stitch.  I also did 1 less ch than specified at the beginning of each row, as mine tend to be a bit looser than average, I guess, so that one less ch made my edges a bit straighter than they would have been --

• Row 3: Ch3, 1 DC, [ch1, sk 2, DC, ch1, sk 2, 3 DC in next st] 32 times (on the last rep, 2 DC at very end) [129 sts].
• Row 4: Ch3, DC, [(DC, ch1, DC) all in next st, 2 DC in next st, sk 3, 2 DC in next st] 32 times, (DC, ch1, DC) in top of ch3.  Note that the "sk 3" will be above a DC in the row below.
• Row 5: Ch3, 2 DC in 1st st, [DC in sp of sk3 section, 6 DC in ch1 sp] 32 times, 3 DC in top of ch3. Note that the 6-DC cluster will be above the 3-DC cluster in the row below.
• Row 6: Ch3, sk1, 1 HDC, 1 DC, sk1, [2 DC, 2 HDC, 2 DC, sk1] 32 times, 2 DC, 1 HDC in top of ch3.  Note that each bracketed section will be centered over the 6-DC cluster of the row below.
• Row 7: STDC, DC in 1st st, DC, sk1, (2 DC, sk1) 64 times, 3 DC (the last in top of ch3).

As I said, I did not have nearly enough wool to do the four rows of DC mesh at the top of each edging section (which is worked four times!), so in frustration, I just worked the mesh on each side until the wool ran out, estimated how many rows total I could get, which ended up being about a quarter of what was called for, and then ripped out the ones that had gone past that.  In the end, I decided that, really, an open section of mesh down the middle makes a rather drafty afghan, and so I would work the edging only through Row 7 on one side of each of the two panels, stitch those two together, and then work as much of the mesh as I had yarn on the two "outside" borders. 

It also seemed to me -- and perhaps I'm mistaken, not having that much experience with crochet -- that having a mattress-stitched seam running through a quite-pretty lacy panel might look just a bit clunky, and so, remembering some particularly clever methods I'd come across for joining crochet squares and used myself with tolerable success, I decided to do one of those instead of a mattress-stitched seam.  (I used the fourth one from the top, the one with the sort of "telegraph pole" look to it).  I thought this suited the pattern quite well, actually, and would recommend it to anyone making this blanket, certainly if not using the full complement of mesh rows down the middle.  (I ended up, by the way, after joining the two panels after their respective 7th rows, getting a grand total of two rows of mesh on the two outside edges, four altogether, far less than the sixteen the pattern called for with ten balls of Baby Merino, even subtracting maybe two of those which got used up in my join.  Oof.)

But -- as I said -- it turned out very pretty, and I'm also quite happy with the color, which was Jaeger Baby Merino 233 Lilac overdyed with 1 package of grape Kool-Aid per ball.  Interesting that it came out mottled even though I did not try to get it so.  It looks very different in different lights, as you can see!

(Yes, that is my HST quilt, finished and on the bed!)

Out of the Frying Pan

I decided that both because I was quite unsure if the amount of wool that I have would make it all of the way through the "Modern Classic Baby Blanket" and that the mottled over-dye distracted from the lovely stitch pattern anyway, and that, to be honest, being still a novice crocheter there were times when I couldn't understand what I was supposed to do -- I would set that pattern aside and go for a more sure thing.  I searched online for patterns specifically using Jaeger Baby Merino DK, and came up with the "Basic Blanket" from Simple Crochet for Cherished Babies by Jane Davis, which, wonder of wonders, is held by my public library and was on the shelf at that very moment. 

The construction is a bit strange, and not quite clear since there is only one photo of the finished blanket in the book and it's scrunched and folded over on itself, and the instructions never say "make a second panel" but I think this is how it goes: you work the DC panel, turn that on its side and work the edging, then break the yarn and work the edging on the other side, and then make a second panel in the same way and sew them together up the middle.

You can't quite see them in my photo, but there are three safety pins where I joined in new balls of yarn -- the first about a third of the way up the main panel, the second almost two-thirds up, and the third a row or two into the edging (near where the crochet hook is at the moment).  That is, yes, four balls of yarn so far, with six more rows of the first border section and all eleven rows on the second still to go -- and I have ten balls altogether.  Rather naïvely, I suppose, I did not make a gauge swatch, since I'm using the same yarn and a one-size-smaller hook, but it turns out that my gauge is much bigger than the one in the pattern, so I suppose that's at least part of the issue.  Regardless, though, I don't think ten balls of yarn is enough as it stands now, and so I need to figure out how much smaller I must make the blanket in order to use as much of the yarn as possible.

I do rather like the overdye with this pattern, though -- it's not quite as "busy" as the Modern Classic blanket (which, again, I think would be wonderful in a solid yarn, and I will keep it in mind as a potential future project).  It might be also that this one has a bit more "space" in the twiddly part, more lacy-ness, as it were --

A Little Bit Here, a Little Bit There ...

Well, it has been over a month since I posted, and I didn't even realize it.  I finished the "Honeysuckle Sampler" ages ago, enjoyed it very much despite the egregious number of queen-stitch flowers in that border (!) -- haven't blocked it yet, though, obviously.  I made some very slight changes, re-positioning the signature line a little, and centering the date by moving it down a single thread -- feeling a bit of an outlaw as I did so, as nobody ever seems willing to suggest that sort of thing even though sometimes a motif looks quite strange with two two-thread rows below it and only one above.  (I think I made the "J" a stitch wider as well -- and why not?!)  These thread colors look very well against the natural linen, I think!

Also unblocked, "Samplings IV" by Ellen Chester, from her "Quaker Samplings series.  This is on the 36-count Edinburgh linen that I coffee-dyed over the summer.  I enjoyed working this little sampler very much, and the thread is quite handsome -- Gentle Art's "Brethren Blue" -- and so I look forward to the rest of the series, which I will do in a selection of different colors.  I've started the "Samplings V" -- in Gentle Art's "French Lilac" but got distracted ...

I got a new phone for free so felt entirely justified in splurging a bit on a new case, the first one I've ever bought, since all my others were hand-me-downs.  Some folks might recognize the place names as being in the Lake District, others might realize, from, say the campsite just there near the compass rose, and the Amazon Boathouse across the lake, that it is actually Swallows and Amazons!  It makes me happy every time I see it, and that's the first time I've ever said that about a phone, to be sure, so well worth the extra few dollars.  And it has prompted me to start rereading the series -- I'm now in the middle of Pigeon Post, so about halfway along.

I had a bag of Jaeger Baby Merino in the bottom of a box, that I kept passing over because while the yarn is delicious, the color was just kind of meh.  I debated with myself for months about overdyeing it -- what if it went badly? aaugh -- but a few weeks ago, I said to myself, "Right, just do it."  I wound into skeins and dyed it with one envelope each of grape-flavored Kool-Aid, and was pleased to see that everything turned out rather well.  It's a bit more mottled than I was expecting -- that was really the only surprise. 

I had been half-planning to make a Christmas-present afghan with it for Laura -- whose favorite color is purple -- and I liked the "Modern Classic Baby Blanket" by Kirsten Holloway, though I've stalled a bit after working the first end section.  It seems to me that the mottled color of the yarn obscures the intricacy of the design -- the purple is a bit darker in real life than in the photo -- ironically, the yarn and the pattern would most likely have suited each other better with the yarn in its original state.  The stitches are on the complex side, and it took me a while to puzzle through some of them, but it worked out well -- but the other thing that is giving me pause is that it's very yardage-hungry, and this bit alone used up a whole ball and a good portion of another, and I've got only ten!  So my choices are to forge ahead and hope for the best, to try out the "plain" panel and see if the yarn goes further, as I could omit the inner fancy-work, or try something else altogether.  Ten skeins sounds like a lot; I can hardly believe that I couldn't make a lap blanket out of ten skeins!

In my indecision, I came across this "Japanese View" cross-stitch chart, available free at Smart Cross Stitch, and thought it also might make a good present for Laura --

and so as I have accumulated a considerable stash of 28-count Monaco in the past few decades, I thought, "Go for it!"  But I have had the dickens of a time with it -- counted wrong and somehow couldn't figure out where, picked out all of the mountain bits I'd done, got off again and picked it all out a second time (luckily not so far along as before), ran out of the medium-purple (of course, half of it was in shreds on the floor), did it a third time using a couple of in-betweens I had in my needle case as re-positionable guide lines.  Now at last I feel like I'm getting somewhere and it looks like the beginnings of a mountain view instead of a bunch of random specks, which is encouraging.

(Why multiple presents for Laura?  She has just gone off for her first year away at university, after spending her post-high-school years thus far at the local community college.  She is still in the same time-zone, but far enough away that I know she isn't living at home any more.  The compulsion to make things for her is especially strong.)

Lest you think I do not knit anymore -- I have been working on this scarf (which is "Camptown Races"), albeit for what seems an eternity.  I might rename it "Grandmother's Footsteps" as I keep finding that I've been daydreaming and lost track of which row I was on, so that some of the sections have far too many stitches, and I have to rip back to the point where it went wrong.  It's very nice yarn and lovely to knit with, thank goodness, and doesn't seem to mind my two-steps-forward, one-step-back.  If we take the train to visit Laura, this will be a perfect carry-along!

And there is the binding on my "Persuasion" quilt, which binding is very long (somewhat over queen-sized), but of course would probably be finished already if I didn't keep getting distracted ...

Summer Reading

I was sitting here some weeks ago thinking suddenly, I need to read more, and so I pondered for a while what to choose.  I decided that it was time, after a great many years, to reread the Narnia books, and though I finished Prince Caspian with a sigh of pleasure and my hand was reaching, metaphorically, for Dawn Treader, it occurred to me that there were six volumes of Arthur Ransome's "Swallows and Amazons" series on my shelf still utterly unread.  I had picked up Swallows and Amazons at our beloved local children's bookstore, and enjoyed it very much, enough that when the owner decided to retire and was selling off her stock at half-price, I went over and bought all of the rest of the series that she had -- and yet, there they sat on the shelf, for years.  And so I thought now that they would be just the thing right now, in these difficult times when one wants children's stories with plenty of adventure but the assurance of a safe homecoming at the end.  It had been long enough that I thought I should read the first book again, just to get the sail filled, as it were, and I enjoyed it just as much as the first time around.  But I have to say that, while the first book is certainly good, Ransome really hit his stride as he went on.  He clearly knows his stuff, both boats and the Lake District in which many of the stories are set, and better still, he has that rather rare ability to write from a child's perspective that makes you forget that he isn't one himself -- as I say, I love the Narnia stories, but it is always clear that they are being told to you by an adult, where Ransome reminds me quite a lot in this respect of Elizabeth Enright's Melendy family series, a different sort of story but with that same feeling of immediacy, of being immersed in it yourself, this is what it's like. 

I read, in rapid succession, Swallowdale, Winter Holiday, Pigeon Post, We Didn't Mean to Go to Sea, Secret Water, and Great Northern?, coming suddenly to the end of my collection with a sigh of dismay.  They are all, of course, boat-related but the focus is on different things in each, and new characters come in here and there, so that each book is quite different -- especially, I thought, We Didn't Mean to Go to Sea, as throughout the series there are adventures and risky situations of course, but, perhaps because I'm a parent now and long past being the same age as the Walker children, the very real danger they are in at being literally swept out to sea was more than unsettling.  (This one contains the only mention in the whole series of one of the children being seasick, and the physical reality of it comes as quite a shock.)  But, as I say, I enjoyed the series immensely, and can see why so many readers still think of them as beloved favorites.  I am amazed only at the fact that I had never heard of them before!

(The photograph is a still from the 2016 movie version of the first book.  I haven't seen it -- I found out about it not long after I finished the book the second time, but after reading in reviews that the writers felt it necessary to insert a completely new subplot about real spies, I thought, "oh no!"  Hearing that Susan has been turned into a whiny bumbler who can't even manage to cook a fish made me shriek -- apparently Peter has also been made "more real".  Why, why, why take classics that generations of children have loved passionately, and change them??  Oh, well -- it looks beautiful, at least.  Sigh.)

The D.E. Stevenson list is reading Amberwell, and this time around I volunteered to lead a section, offering a summary of each chapter and some discussion questions.  Mine turned out to be quite early in the book, chapters 4-6, which I estimate to be taking place around 1930.  The Ayrton family live in a fine old estate on the west coast of Scotland -- the story begins a few centuries earlier with the building of the house and the establishment of the Ayrtons, but by chapter 4 the main characters of the "present day" have been introduced, Mr. and Mrs. Ayrton, his two sons from his first marriage, and three daughters from this second, which daughters are all still under ten and in the care of their Nannie.  One of the central events of this section, and a recurring motif in the story, is the dedication of Mr. Ayrton's contribution to the estate -- others in the generations before him were a walled garden, a bowling-green, a stone terrace, and so on -- Mr. Ayrton has decided upon a fountain with the statue of a little mermaid. On the day of the ceremonial Turning on the Fountain, the girls are sitting on rugs on the bowling-green in their best dresses and the boys in their kilts, waiting for the festivities, and Nannie is nearby keeping an eye on them, and knitting.  This seems too good and opportunity to pass up, to choose something for my "Knitting with DES" virtual knit-along -- so what might Nannie be knitting, I asked myself.

This is a bit later than ca.1930, by about a decade, but how could I possibly resist three little girls in matching boleros? and just the right ages!  This is in the Bestway 749 booklet, this pattern available for a small fee from FabForties.co.uk (who seems to have changed her name recently from The Vintage Knitting Lady, perhaps to specialize in the 1940s?).

(The house in the photo above, by the way, is Inchmarlo, not on the west coast as in the story but in Aberdeenshire.  My Scottish-immigrant ancestors worked there, according to the 1840 census!  The descriptions of Stevenson's Amberwell and a number of the dust-jacket illustrations in the book's long publishing history remind me of Inchmarlo, and so I was delighted to find this photo available for Creative Commons use at Geograph.uk -- this one is by Stanley Howe.)

"Swallows and Amazons" leads quite naturally to a grown-up sea adventure, and I picked up Patrick O'Brian's Master and Commander after many years -- too long!  I've only just finished the second in the series, Post Captain, enjoying every moment.  O'Brian's prose is so complex yet wonderfully fluid that it is a pleasure to read, and his flashes of wit and deft characterizations are sheer genius.

(The photo -- from Wikimedia Commons -- is the stern of the Surprise built for the 2003 movie and now at the Maritime Museum of San Diego.)

It's been too hot lately for snuggling-under-a-blanket reading, so I just made one instead, and gave it away as a house-warming present -- it is the simple-but-effective "Modern Granny Stitch Blanket" by Jess of Make & Do Crew.  I used the recommended Lion Brand "Heartland" yarn, in "Glacier Bay", "Hot Springs", "Olympic", "Mount Rainier", and "Kings Canyon" (for a lark, try guessing which is which! I think I got only one right). 

I ran out of "Olympic" just a little over two rows short -- there had been only one skein of it in the store, so I bought a sixth color but decided that I'd risk looking for another skein somewhere else.  And rather surprisingly, because it's 100% acrylic and therefore produced by recipe that isn't subject to the whims and eccentricities of natural fibers, the dye lots of "Olympic" at least are noticeably, even disappointingly, different.  There is much less of the black in the second skein, leaving the color rather dull and flat -- oh, well.

I'm not generally a huge fan of acrylics, but this is quite pleasant to work with, and I must say it makes yummy tassels!

Granny Square Sampler Afghan!

I just realized that I haven't written this up yet, so I "borrowed" the lawn next door for a quick photo session this morning, and here it is!  This is of course the Granny Square Sampler Afghan, following the project led by Blair Stocker in 2012.  (There is also a Flickr group, for more inspiration.)  I really enjoyed this, and learned a lot about crochet -- which was the point, after all. 

There are two different join-as-you-go methods here -- one (demonstrated here by Annette of My Rose Valley)  that is more-or-less adding another round of granny clusters to a square but instead of working a chain st or two in between, reaching up to work one of those ch sts through the ch space in the square you are joining to, and another method (demonstrated here at Carina's Craftblog) in which you work another row of granny clusters but alternate attaching it to the bottom square or the top square, essentially flipping every other cluster "upside down".  I like both of these methods, but I think that with my "crazy" layout, the "flipping" one was much more efficient, and so after joining two sets of four squares with the former, I found myself using the latter method for pretty much everything else.  I think I made it a bit harder on myself by joining the squares free-form, as there are a number of slight wobbles all over, due to fiddling the number (or size!) of clusters, but wool, bless it, blocking disguises any number of irregularities.  If I do another of these -- and why not, it's a great stash-buster, and would certainly never be boring -- I will probably use Adaiha's tutorial for joining squares of different sizes.

I didn't use one of the squares Blair did, and added in some, including "Nana's Latte Square", which I will definitely use again (I love the soft neutrals in solid squares, in the photo from PDKlein on the Ravelry page). I really liked the Granny Wheel Square, so much that I made two in quick succession -- it's interesting how a color change can give a quite different effect.  The "little bit of white" in single crochet on my first one (now towards the upper right corner) isn't really enough, but the speckly line is not uninteresting.  The other "new" square is Granny On Point.  Inadvertently, I didn't really follow the instructions, because I was looking at a photo of someone else's square in the Granny Sampler photo pool at Flickr at the same time, and found myself, to my later amazement -- I don't crochet! really! -- following the photo as though it were a chart of instructions.  It's that light-bulb moment, when after months of not understanding what you are doing or quite what you're looking at when you've done it ("is that a double-crochet or a triple? wait, how do you make a half-double, where's my cheat sheet ...") things finally begin to make sense.  I used different borders on each of them, because I could.

For the edging on my afghan, I used the brilliantly simple variation on granny clusters by Jacquie at Bunny Mummy, which she calls Double V Edging.

10th Update

Here is the status as of this afternoon of the main projects I've got going.  I usually wake up early most mornings, and so after breakfast I stitch for an hour or so on the miniature Kurdistan prayer rug, before I put in my contact lenses.  I continue to find this an utter pleasure to work.  The strange white diagonal lines are the traveling threads on the back!

Granny Sampler Afghan all stitched together -- at last, she said wearily -- and the border almost finished.  Still have about two-thirds of the ends to weave in, though.  Sigh.  On the bright side, it was looking very, um, extemporaneous for a while, and looks much more cohesive now, so I'm quite pleased with it.

A loaf of Finnish rye bread, from Nigella Lawson's How to be a Domestic Goddess -- amazingly easy, since there was almost no kneading, to my surprise.  Even better that it tastes delicious and used 180g of the rye flour that's been lurking in my freezer for years.  (I might have to buy more now, actually, this is so good.)

Swatching with the KnitPicks "Palette".  I wrote here quite some time ago that I wanted to knit the Victory Jumper with it, and I still think the yarn would suit the pattern well, but I think what was bothering me at the back of my mind so much that I've left it for a full year was that it's just a bit itchy to want to wear against the skin.  What I'm thinking now is something more like this lacy waistcoat/vest from DROPS ...

These faux tiles would obviously look a bit more "realistic" when attached more snugly -- I've started gluing them to a paper base, which is curling a bit when just propped up against the front façade of the tea-shop-to-be -- but I'm just not very happy with them, I'm afraid.  I could live with the uneven surfaces, but the fraction-of-a-fraction difference in sizes is quite glaring at 1:12 scale.  So it's on to plan B, but unfortunately I don't yet know what plan B is.

Still pretty happy with this.  I'm really fascinated by Quaker samplers -- I think what pleases me most about this particular one (aside from the ligatures, of course) is the combination of complex motifs with serene colors.  I've made a few tweaks of the chart here and there, and haven't yet filled in the empty spaces with their smaller motifs.

Tomato seedlings, hardening off the last few days before getting planted.  Some of the seeds didn't sprout along with their brethren, and so I put another seed in those pots -- then lo, up came the first one! and now some of the pots have two seedlings.  With limited space in my two new raised beds, I had ordered seeds of two heirloom dwarf varieties, and then the seed company sent a third packet "similar to my selections" free, so I have eight little pots altogether, the purple cherry tomato "Dwarf Velvet Night" and the bicolor beefsteak "Dwarf  Beauty King," plus "Dwarf Sleeping Lady".  (I think I wrote "Sleeping Beauty" on the stick!)

The arroyo lupines and the lacy phacelia in our front garden are looking a bit decrepit now, since being the first ones to appear they have been setting seed for some weeks, but the mountain garlands are in full glory at the moment -- I think they are what I was most looking forward to, so it's lovely to gaze across the field of them (stopping before one's eye gets to the line of cars perpetually resident along both sides of the street these lock-down days, as so few of our neighbors are going anywhere at all).  Though this photo doesn't really convey the delicious colors (nor the hum of the delighted and slightly drunken bees), I've left the photo full-size, so you can get the full effect!  The shrubs that I can still find (!) are all doing well, and the little California wild rose has buds on it, hurray!

Granny Square Afghan, Week 14

The fourteenth square for the Granny Square Afghan is a rectangular granny -- the assignment was to make two, but these were like dessert after the relative complexity of the recent squares, and after the first one I didn't need to look at the instructions at all -- I did all three of these in just the one day -- so it was a pleasure to make more than requested.  And I looked at my bag of yarn and thought, "gee, I don't seem to have used up very much ..." so why not?!

Grannies Go Off-Piste

This post was originally titled "Grannies Go Wild!" since the next squares in the Granny Square Sampler afghan are spirals and "whirligigs", but I ended up wandering off on my own for modifications to the squares that Blair uses.

The spiral one didn't speak much to me, I admit.  There is a very similar-looking alternative here that has one more round -- I was also tempted to use the Squaring the Spiral dishcloth pattern instead, but went with the original selection (though I'm sure I'll make a couple of those dishcloths before long!). 

The square for week 13 is called the Whirligig, and to be honest it had my head spinning.  The look of it in the photo wasn't particularly appealing to me, the inevitable lumpiness of it, I suppose, where the rounds of the contrast color meet.  I couldn't understand from the direction in the introduction to "double crochet into the back loop only" how it would produce what I could see in the photo, either -- I have worked this maneuver before, and it makes a sort of little twist or cord running across the tops of the stitches, which is the front loop left clear of the next round.  In my travails with the African Flower square, I had seen a video on YouTube featuring a square which had a very attractive line of what I as a knitter think looks just like a vikkel braid!  This is, I saw, another result of crocheting through the back post, this time in a continuous line -- it sort of folds over the top of the row, so that the "braid" effect shows on the front, though -- wait for it, crocheters! -- I realized when I tried it that using a second color when working through the back post does turn that chain or "braid" down towards the front but it also leaves the loop that has gone around the back post showing below the braid with a distracting (in my case) blip of contrast color.  In another bit of reverse-engineering something that has already been invented, I discovered that if you crochet through what I would call the "purl bump" on the back of a DC stitch, this folds the "braid" down very handsomely with no unattractive blip -- this effect has obviously been long known to crocheters as there are numerous tutorials already out there.  It is called "working through the third loop".

But as I was satisfied with what I had already done, I left it at that!

My gold spiral is essentially the Square Spiral Coaster which to my surprise I quite like.  The surface crochet is simple and neat, though for an afghan square it is a bit stiff because of the "embroidery".  For my grey circles square -- you can see the back in the photo above -- I used the double-crochet square here, with an extra round of the base color so that I could have an odd number of circles, five rounds of the surface crochet instead of four.

Going back to the original pattern and actually working it (!), I realized that, not unlike surface crochet, the contrast color is worked after the background square is completed.  It's a little difficult to see because the photo of Beth's original square uses a black yarn as the contrast color, but I think that her contrast line really does lie flat, unlike Blair's in her top photo, which is kind of turned on its side, though maybe this is a result of her squares curling up at the edges more than Beth's.

That wee grey-and-blue square is essentially the original Whirligig without the added-later SCs in front loop, and with alternating colors starting on the third round -- I was going to keep going the full five rounds, but stopped after the third because I liked it that size.  I did try the SC-into-front loop, and it certainly did want to turn over on its side, even more so when I tried just slip-stitch, so I pulled it off and just carried on with the back-loop DCs, which makes a perfectly usable square.

The Flowering of the Grannies

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 ...

Granny Square Sampler Afghan: Week 6

The square for week 6 of the Granny Square Sampler afghan is the "Sunburst Variation" with little flecks of color in the fifth round (the first two rounds use the same yarn).  I like the way it emphasizes the roundness of the center.

(Oh, it is a bittersweet pleasure working with Matchmaker Merino DK.  Sturdy and yet oh-so-soft -- it slips through my fingers like water rippling in a brook.)