Finished!

Today, the crib blanket!

Tomorrow, the foundation!!!

And then both the current pains in my neck will be gone! Woo hoo!

All I need to do is give the blanket a spin through the washer and dryer to set it -- killing the acrylic will go a long way towards softening this blanket up. And then I can wrap it and get back to the very important business of knitting.

I'm really excited about the return to knitting and can't decide what to pick up next. Fulmar's sleeves? A sock? Or one of the other many knits-in-progress? Ah, what a happy dilemma.

The Home Stretch

If you look closely, you will see a line of green double crochet stitches that represents the beginning of the blanket border. Oh, yeah, baby. The body is done. Time for the border.

I spent most of the weekend eating advil and drinking tea and working on the blanket in front of the television. The body measures between 28 and 29 inches wide, depending on how I smooth it out before measuring it. And depending on where I measure it. Let's just say that thanks to my unique gauge, it's about a quarter inch (maybe 3/8 inch) longer on one side. This, I can live with.

I'm ahead of schedule, thanks to two factors. First, the oh-so-delightful foundation repair crew made it impossible for me to do much besides crochet and cry last week. Second, Trish at Nana's Knits convinced me I could shave a couple inches off my planned width and still have a darn fine blanket. mwah, Trish! I do love the way your mind works!

So, the plan is to do a two-color border of alternating rows of single shells, but first I'm adding a single row of double crochets to stabilize the work at the sides. (Because I worked the blanket sideways, crocheting up and down the length instead of side to side across the width, the side of the raw work will actually be the top and bottom of the finished blanket. It needs a little more stability there.)

With luck and a healthy wrist, this thing could be done in the next few days, certainly by the end of the week. We'll see. My wrist aches and could very likely swell overnight. But I'm hoping if I sleep in the brace, it will be okay.

In any event, the end is in sight. This thing might actually be finished before the June 1 shower date. Imagine that! A gift done on time without having to lose sleep the night before the party! And -- oh, praise heaven -- I might be back to knitting as soon as this weekend! Woohoo!

Whew!

Those of you who have had the misfortune of witnessing my crocheting in person this week will understand the significance of this picture. All week, I've been on a mission to get the crib blanket 20" wide. The shower is June 1. I have a deadline. <---- read that line in a voice of doom

I've carefully avoided my knitting needles while laboring through my eight inch goal for the week. I'd promised myself that once I made it to 15", I could take an hour or two for knitting, and I did. That was the halfway mark, and it deserved a little knitting reward in celebration. But then that left five inches of crochet with no hope of a break.

So Tuesday, I knit a bit, then switched back to the blanket.

Wednesday, I crocheted during my lunch break. Then I took it to my SnB meeting Wednesday night. Then Thursday afternoon for open knitting at Nana's. By that point, I was all the way to eighteen inches, and ready to cry.

Those people who talk about how fast crochet is? They're a bunch of damn liars. It's not fast. It's endless. There's a whole ring of hell full of people crocheting a king-sized bed blanket. They've been working on it for millenia. You can almost see the pattern now. That's how slow crochet is.

Or maybe it's just me.

Well, whatever. I made my twenty inch goal for the week. My new week with my new goal starts tomorrow. That means I can KNIT today. And thank God for that.

How It Looks (Cringe)

I can't believe I'm posting pictures of my crappy mutant crochet for anyone to see. Told you I suck at this.

I finished the first two balls of Encore today and started the next two. Right now, the blanket is about 7" long and my wrist is beginning to protest. There's so much more twisting in crochet than in knitting. I may have to cool it tomorrow. My goal is to get past 8" by the end of the day Thursday, but I won't make that goal if my hand has to go in the splint. That's my big fear with this project. Return of tendonitis.

I have six balls of each color, and the first pair of balls yielded 6.5" of fabric. So that means the existing yarn will make a 39" blanket. I'd like it just a few inches longer than that, so I'll pick up an extra ball of the pink to do a border and edging.

According to the imprecise timing method I've been using, I'm averaging about 40 minutes per full row of color (one row of worms plus one row of shells). Each full row is right around a half inch. That means I'm looking at around 54 hours of crocheting time PLUS the border.

All of which just makes me appreciate my grandmother even more. When I think of all the blankets she made, OMG. Every one of us got a twin sized one to take to college and a full sized one as a wedding shower gift. Plus random surprise afghans when we'd happen to redecorate or something. Thousands of hours, miles and miles of yarn. Tell you what. Her wrists must have been a lot sturdier than mine!

How It Should Look

These are close-ups of an afghan my grandmother made circa 1976. We can date it because it was made to match a gold velvet sofa my mother bought during her bicentennial redecorating mania. Everything in our family room then had eagles on it. The adjoining bathroom was papered in stars and stripes -- even the ceiling. Ah, the 70s. The entire decade suffered from an excess of bad taste.

So the afghan was made in two shades of gold, a yellowish gold and a burnished orangey gold. It's big enough to lay flat on top of a double bed without any overhang, so we have periodically used it as a bed blanket.

Some of you have asked for an explanation of how to make this pattern. (For the rest of you, feel free to stop reading here. This is about to get really confusing and crochet-y.) It's basically just interlocking shells with these wormy things holding the two sides together. Each shell is made from five double crochets into the center stitch of the 5-dc shell below it. But you don't just crochet into that center stitch -- you have to catch the wormy thing over your hook and bind the old shell and the wormy thing together while making the new shell. I don't know if I'm explaining it in a way that makes sense. It's one of those "you get it when you see it" things. Also, chain one between each of the shells--that chain one will be the place where you anchor the worms with single crochet stitches.

The worms are made by chaining 6 and then single crocheting into the chain one between the shells in the row below. So the pattern goes something like this:

Cast on 4 stitches per shell, plus one at the end. Make this chain as long as you want the blanket to be wide. We'll call this Color A.

With Color A, make a 5-dc shell into every third stitch, then chain one. So it's like this: *skip two, 5-dc shell into third stitch, chain one*, repeat between *. You'll have one stitch left on the cast on chain at the end of the row. (Except somehow, I always have two leftover. That's the magic of me and crochet.) Do not turn the work.

Then you drop that yarn and switch colors. Attach Color B into the leftover stitch on the Color A base chain with a single crochet. Chain 6, single crochet into the chain stitch at the end of the Color A shell below. And so on, all the way across to the end. At the very end, chain two or three -- I'm totally not sure which, so end up changing my number from row to row. Then turn the work.

Still using Color B, make a 5-dc shell into the center dc of each shell below. This is where you have to lay the wormy thing on top of your hook to bind the two colors together. Don't forget the chain one between the shells. (That reminder is mostly for my own benefit. I tend to forget that part.)

Go all the way across and drop Color B. Pick up color A and repeat until you have a blanket.

Or something like that. God help any of you who try to follow my instructions. I'm sure it would make more sense if I could show you. Or maybe not, all things considered.

Buckle Up!

It's going to be a bumpy ride!

This is the start of the crocheted crib blanket using my grandma's pattern which she called, simply, the double afghan. She crocheted thousands of miles of yarn into this pattern during her lifetime. Every night for at least an hour or two, she'd sit in her chair with a pack of L&Ms and a bag of Jay's to keep her company while she worked on blankets for the entire family.

She taught me to crochet. If you can call what I do crocheting, that is. I'm not good at it, and that's not false modesty. My loops are never the same size. My shells lean as if they've all been italicized. This would bother me more if I cared about the craft, but I don't. I'm a knitter. Crochet just happens sometimes. You know, sort of like droughts and plagues and other disasters.

My grandmother passed away almost fifteen years ago, and I'm the only one in the vast clan to know her pattern. All those people -- seriously, at least fifty people in that branch of the family -- and not one of them picked it up from her besides me. That has always mystified me.

In any event, when my uncle found out his wife was pregnant (thanks to some help from a fertility clinic), I immediately resolved to make them a crib blanket in grandma's pattern. She would have done it for them, had she lived long enough to celebrate this miracle with us. And I hate the thought that all the rest of us got one of her blankets, but this baby, this miracle child of her adored youngest son, will never know her or her blankets. I'm a little choked up now thinking about that.

I bought the green yarn right away and used it, with a spare skein of white, to practice the stitch. (It didn't help.) And then I waited to learn the baby's gender. It's a girl!

The pink yarn arrived today, and I picked it up and brought it home. It has taken me almost two hours to work that little bit in the picture -- basically the cast on chain, plus a row of "right side" shells and a row of interwoven pink "worms" which will serve as the base chain for the "wrong side" color.

Trish asked me today how long it would take me to make this blanket. I'm already panicking about the June 1 shower date. And given that it took me two hours to work that pathetic little strip, thanks to my complete inability to count to three, five, or six, I think we're in for a race against the clock.

My mantra for the next fifty days: It will be worth it, it will be worth it, it will be worth it....