I’ve been working steadily on the little blankets for Grace and Noah. Noah’s is finished except for the few ends I still have to weave (the main reason I rarely work in stripes). Grace’s is about half-finished. No pictures yet of either, I’m afraid. Grace’s would be finished by now, except I stressed myself out so much trying to finish Noah’s as fast as I could, and worrying about running out of yarn, that I couldn’t bear to touch the needles for three days after it was finished. I hate when that happens, when my fingers feel like they never want to be in those positions again. Fortunately it wore off, as it usually does, and her blanket is now coming along nicely.
I keep the bag of yarn from Unwind next to my desk at home, the cotton yarn that I bought specifically for more Grace and Noah blankets, and the brilliantly bright colors keep calling to me. I can’t wait to finish the current one so I can get started on those delicious colors.
And since I hate to write a post without including at least one picture, here is a pic of my very first blanket, made in 2004 for my mom’s birthday. It was made with Cascade’s Lana D’Oro series, long since discontinued, to my great dismay. It was my first experience with alpaca, and I’ve been in love ever since. The blanket itself is terribly ugly–it was my first experience with squares, and they weren’t the same size, and I didn’t know how to crochet then to even out the smaller ones. I ran out of time, and so I didn’t have the right balance of colors, and since they were all oddly sized, their placement depended on where each would fit, instead of where the color would look best. Seriously, the ugliest blanket ever. And I remember so clearly spending the entire day before Mom arrived for her visit stitching it together–a terribly hot day to be working with alpaca and wool.
But she said she loved it, and got mad when I apologized for its ugliness. I wanted to include it in her coffin when she died, but I didn’t find it until a few days after her funeral, wrapped up and packed away to protect it from the cats. It’s now wrapped up and packed away to protect it from my cats. Sometimes I think about taking it out and trying to fix it–maybe adding more squares to balance the colors, or embroidering some designs on the plainer blocks, or adding a crocheted border around the edges. Maybe I’ll make that a goal for the rest of 2007.
