Sharfi's blanket

My cousin Sharfi started college at Hamilton College last week, and celebrated her 18th birthday a couple of weeks back. Because I've been a sucky cousin, and let my tedious grad school lifestyle get in the way of properly congratulating her, I decided that she needed a super fantastic birthday present. She needed... a blankie! Project details: This blanket is made of 100% acrylic (Red Heart and Caron Simply Soft), mostly so that the college kids can dirty it, crumple it up, and toss it in the washing machine when necessary without too much trouble. It is stitched entirely in double crochet, which means that, except for the color changes, this was a pretty elementary project for me. The border is composed of a simple five-stitch shell. I created the graph for the blankie by finding a graphic of Hamilton College's athletic logo on their website, and superimposing it on an Excel spreadsheet with equal sized rows and columns. Each "square" of the grid mapped to a block of three stitches across and two stitches in depth. Lessons learned:
It is a BIG FAT CHORE to weave in a million and one yarn ends when crocheting a graphed image such as this. Nonetheless, the finished result is impressive enough looking that the pain in the butt is worth it.
It is really, really important to do a gauge swatch (how many times have I read that on various blogs before?) , even for something as simple as a blanket. For a while there, I thought I'd end up with a really fat, short blanket, until I figured out to make each block on the graph two stitches tall, instead of just one.
Plastic yarn needles suck. Oh, how I longed for my steel yarn needles while I was working on this blanket in New York!

My crochet beginning

Time to fill this blog up with some substance! I've got pictures of my latest project coming up in the next post, but first, I thought I'd put down a proper beginning to this blog.

Sometime in 2001 (summer? winter?), I became hit with the inexplicable urge to learn crochet. I say "inexplicable" because I am definitely not a handicrafty type of person, or artistic in any sense of the word, really. My hobbies have always been more cerebral or, rather, inside-my-headish; I'd never really gravitated towards activities where I actually produced something tangible.

But then again, I guess I come from crafting blood. My mother used to sew many of my clothes when I was a kid, both everyday kinds of playclothes and fancy frocks with oodles of smocking on the bodice. My Nanu (mom's mom) taught me how to knit when I was a little girl, and even today, spends hours crocheting fancy, fine-thread lace onto shawls and tupattas. And my dad tells me that his father (my Dada) used to crochet as well, mostly as a way to relieve stress.

Why did I choose to focus on crochet, instead of the more popular knitting? As I said previously, my Nanu taught me to knit, but it never really "stuck" until very recently. Somewhere, I got the impression that crochet would be easier, and on an impulse, bought some learn to crochet books from Amazon. I spent December 2001 in Bangladesh, and my Nanu gave me some hands-on lessons. Nonetheless, for a while, it seemed like crochet didn't "stick" either, and I put down my hooks for several years.

Blah blah blah. This explanation is taking too long, and possibly getting too schmaltzy. Long story short: I picked my crochet hooks back up in January 2004, bought myself a children's beginning crochet book, and finally managed to crochet myself a hat and a scarf in one evening. I was thoroughly amazed that I had actually MADE something that I could wear, and that feeling was good enough that I haven't looked back since.

Today, I crochet tons and tons and tons, with both thread and yarn. Additionally, with the aid of a good book, I FINALLY figured out how to knit for real this winter, and recently made my first pair of socks.

At this point, I've made my fill of flat, rectangular objects in single or double crochet. I'm ready to move on to more challenging things -- shaped garments, delicate laces, interestingly textured fabrics. I'm hoping that this blog will motivate me to push myself beyond my comfort zone.

So, here we go...