The Little Ones have returned to school. Life resumes a regular schedule. Bedtimes are again enforced.
This is my New Year. It's a chance to start fresh. In addition to getting the kids geared up for school, I cleaned out my home office and re-organized everything. Very refreshing.
My August New Year comes complete with resolutions. This year, I want to challenge myself try new techniques, including but not limited to:
- Insert an invisible zipper
- Sew more with knits (two successful projects this week - more on this in a blog post soon!)
- Make something wearable using Tunisian crochet
- Learn the knit and purl stitches with the double-ended crochet hook
- Take a knitting class
- Make a project from Lily Chin's Mosaic Magic.
In the meantime, one of the ladies from my Ravelry Crochet Club mentioned the Attic24 blog a few weeks ago. Wow. Such inspiration! The author is Lucy, she's english, and she writes in a delightfully english tone. She sounds like the kind of person you'd pop over and visit for tea unannounced whilst our kids scampered off to do whatever. Someday, when I cross that overseas trip off my bucket list, I am soooo going to try and meet up with her. I'd like to meet her and thank her in person for the free patterns she designs and the joy she shares with the world in her writing.
Anyhow...
Today's blog post is directly related, because both patterns are available on Lucy's blog, attic24.
The Blooming Flower Cushion and the Granny Stripe Afghan
The flower cushion was just pure fun. It embodies summer and joy and it makes me happy to see it sitting there on my furniture. Below is a close up, and a view of its stripey backside.
The rest of the yarn was made into this Granny Stripe afghan. Moment of truth here: I usually find afghans tedious and boring after about one day. This one was not boring at all! In fact, it was a scientific study of color that I've never done before. With 14 colors at my fingertips, this was pure color exploration in putting combos together that I never would put together ordinarily. I discovered some truly wonderful combinations that will surely show up in future projects.
Oh, and another lesson learned. Fringe is the enemy.
I thought putting a fringe edge on this beast would be an easy substitution to working the remaining yarn ends in with a needle. WRONG! Adding that dang fringe took about 3 hours. (yes, I am bitter toward it still.) A better plan would have been to work in each end immediately upon completion of each row, so I didn't have a mass of loose ends mocking me at the end of the project, saying, "na na na boo boo.....now whatcha gonna do with US?" Gah.
Fringe aside, this is one my most favorite afghans to date.
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