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!
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