Crochet Stuff

In the last month or so I've been overwhelmed by yet more house sorting. I'm going to run out of rooms to re-decorate at some point, surely? We're now on to the middle floor and the room which we have always called my workroom. It was my original craft room when the children were at home and occupied the top floor and it's going to carry on being a sewing room. It was sorely in need of a new coat of paint and a re-varnish for the floor though which I've just finished.

When my son and daughter are both here for a day in a couple of weeks time, they're going to move some furniture back in here. At the moment, the bedroom next door to this room looks like this.

I can just squeeze past the bed to hang up washing in front of the three bookcases stacked in the corner. One corner of this room is also taken up with things my daughter has been storing here while waiting to find a house but the good news is ... they've got somewhere!

This is the best news we've had for years. They have been living in a damp one bedroom flat with no windows for four years, during which time they've had a flood, a fire and numerous other problems. At the moment they are without a cooker or hob and getting the landlord to do anything takes forever. The house they are buying is a four bedroomed thirties semi in Oxford which boasts not only windows but an actual garden! Needless to say, they will be paying less for their mortgage each month than they do in rent on their current flat.

They are hoping to move in the autumn. This means that Rose will be able to take the things she's got here so they will move it all downstairs into what will be the new storage room for now. This is the back room on the ground floor which has also been keeping me busy lately because of this ...

This is what happens when your floor joists are damp. You end up with your floor being several inches lower than the bottom of the walls. After several days of work, Steve the plumber and builder managed to track down the leaking water pipes which were to blame (one hiding under the kitchen floor and the other in a wall), re-route them both and then repair the joists. It made huge amounts of mess as you can imagine but the floor is now magically back where it should be.

I've moved the de-humidifier up from the cellar to that room and it's now chugging away, working to dry the room out. I'm hoping that it will be settled enough to re-decorate next summer and, in the meantime, the floor is now strong enough to use the room to store things while we work on the rest of the house.

All this has not exactly helped my health but, then again, even normal things make my Long Covid worse. I had a straightforward doctor's appointment last month which set me back for weeks. The day after it I lost my sense of taste and smell again and they still haven't recovered. This makes eating more of a chore, combined with being too ill to cook ... I'm meant to be going back for some blood tests but have to recover enough to be able to cope with another appointment. I didn't realise before all this happened how inaccessible the NHS becomes when you're ill. 

Anyway, I expect you've been wondering where crochet comes into all of this. Well, I noticed recently that I have published 599 patterns on ravelry in the last sixteen years (although it does count all those multiple Christmas patterns as separate ones). Anyway, I thought I ought to publish a typical Frankie pattern for my 600th. I decided it should be a bit unusual and involve plastic canvas. Anyone who knits my patterns regularly will know what I mean.

So, I came up with the idea of knitting a mini suitcase. I thought I'd base it on the little card suitcases I use to store my perle threads for making Dorset buttons.

Designing this is not going smoothly. After six complete re-starts, I finally have a lid that actually fits the bottom of the case.

After a similar number of false starts I've also contrived a fastening for it and I am currently avoiding working on the handle. So, needless to say, knitting is not my favourite thing at the moment! Which is why I keep turning to the contents of this basket.

All I want to do is to crochet. This had led to me fishing out various unfinished projects as well as starting several new ones. 

Shall I show you some of them  in a bit more detail? Those plain pink hexagons are the start of a star bedspread, inspired by a vintage pattern. I'm working them in 4 ply and have only done a few so far.

I really like blocking shapes over plastic canvas but, as I don't have any big plastic canvas hexagons - I wonder if you can buy such a thing - I've drawn a hexagon on mountboard and covered it with library film to pin them out on.

The joy of these blocking mats is that they're sturdy enough to prop up out of the way while things are drying. I've only blocked the first couple of hexagons so far so you'll have to imagine how those triangles will eventually become the points of stars.

The next project is also hexagons, this time my version of African Flowers. These are fun to make and I love the way the flower petals suddenly appear about half way through.

I'm using two shades of a variegated yarn called Hayfield Spirit for these, the lighter one for the flowers and the darker one for the edging. I love how well they work together and the cream in between really sets them off.

I can't really say the same about the yarn I'm using for these crochet squares.

Although Batik Swirl is a very nice yarn, I wasn't happy with how I was ending up with a mixture of soled coloured squares and some with just an odd bit of another colour. This is why I decided to add some surface crochet in the shape of four diagonal wavy lines which I'm hoping will make them a bit more interesting.

You get a tidy straight line on the wrong side too which I like. This gives you a bit of an idea of how the squares will look when they're joined.

So much for hexagons and squares. I do enjoy learning new crochet techniques and, last year, I discovered the joys of Corner to Corner Crochet (sometimes called C2C). Look it up and you'll see what I mean. As the name suggests, it's worked diagonally in a series of blocks. I first tried it out when I made a scarf for a friend for Christmas, using King Cole Riot DK.

I can't remember which shade this was, either Rainbow or Caribbean I think. Anyway, never being one to waste a good project, I thought I'd make another one to turn into a pattern. This time I'm using Juniper which is a mixture of pinks and greys.

The other exciting thing about this type of crochet is that it produces a regular grid of blocks which means that, by changing colours and using charts, you can produce all sorts of wonderful pictures. This Christmas Blanket was one of the first to catch my eye. I toyed with lots of ideas for charted designs but then decided to go back to basics which, for me, means maximum effect with minimum effort.

Working diagonal stripes means much less changing of colours but still gives you lots of design possibilities. I'm using two shades of four colours (with cream as the main colour) and making sets of eight different combinations of these colours.

This is the plan for how the finished blanket will look with eight sets of these eight squares.

And yes, I've used this idea before. This is the basic idea behind my knitted Pathways blanket from many, many years ago (hence the dreadful photos). So, here are the first eight squares of what will be my New Pathways blanket.

I won't bore you with the details now but I've worked out a way of changing colours with these squares so that both sides of the blanket will look good which I'm very pleased with. It's nice to be able to throw a blanket down without having to check which side is the right side.

I've also enjoyed learning Tunisian crochet over the years and I'm particularly taken with the colour possibilities you get when working with two yarns and a double ended hook. Here's the scarf I made when I first discovered this technique.

Now I'm using different yarns and a different stitch pattern to make another one - just because I felt like doing some Tunisian crochet again.

This time I'm using two variegated yarns for a more subtle effect; I love the way Tunisian crochet blends variegated yarns so that they look almost woven.

These are all the crochet projects I'm carrying around in my basket but I've also resurrected a couple of others. The first one is a workbag made up of rather over the top flower blocks.

I worked on these flowers four years ago when I was looking after my lovely stepfather, Bob. I kept the bag of yarns up at his house and would do the odd round whenever he didn't need me. He always commented on what I was making and thought these were pretty. After he died and I came down down with Covid the next day, I put this project away and didn't feel like picking it up again. I'd done so much though that it seems daft not finish it so I'm going to try to get it done, although my heart's not really in it.

On a more positive note, I've picked up this baby shawl again lately too. I wanted to design a simple, square shawl that could be worked in washable acrylic yarn and used every day without being scared of spoiling it. 

It's got to be a lot bigger and it will look much better once I've added a pretty border and blocked it. I'm working it in V stitch with lines of eyelets to break it up a bit. I also added a round of clusters every fourth round to make it a bit more interesting and stop it getting too boring to make.

So that's the crochet that's keeping me going at the moment and making life a bit more fun. what about you? Is anyone else in a crochet phase at the moment?