Hearts

The flannel wraps I'm making are to be sent to a heart hospital in Cape Town. I guess 'heart hospital' is not a technical term, but you can read about the hospital here if you want to. Anyway, I thought that adding a tatted heart to the blankets would be appropriate. I've used muskaan's block tatted hearts and Nicola Bowersox's Kiss Curl Heart. I still have a lot of blankets to hem and not a lot of time, so I'm not sure I can make hearts for them all, but so far so good.

Flannel

Round 11 of the Renulek doily has been released. I've made myself a very scruffy sketch to guide me, but I have another job I must get on with. I'm hemming flannel baby wraps for a charity project. I should finish up with 22, so it's quite a big job. I might just have to take some time off to start round 11.

Planning The Next Blanket

The next blanket is for my youngest grandchild, Annika. I've seen several examples on Pinterest of blankets made with asymmetrical granny squares. I'm not sure about the terminology: they seem to be called mitred squares, but mitred squares also refers to another sort of square where decreases are made in the middle, similar to a mitred corner in sewing. I found this example by marrietta.ru which has a chart and, importantly for me, a photo showing the different stages of making the square. It took me a few goes, using scraps, to get a square that looked right - it's not as simple as it seems! I think that a blanket will look best if I use the same colours throughout, rather than my usual practice of using an array of colours. So I deconstructed the square, wound the yarn onto my niddy noddy and worked out how much of each colour I'll need to make 117 squares, the number I used for the flower garden blanket. Right. So now I have a lot of spinning ahead of me before I can start crocheting the blanket.

Round 10

Round 10 is done. Each repeat took me 15 minutes. There are 24 repeats, so that's 6 hours for the round. Plus, of course, time for filling shuttles with thread and the odd untatting episode when I joined a ring to the wrong place. The diameter now is 38 cm/15 inches.

Round Nine

Right, I've finished round 9. Round 10 has already been released, so I'm a bit behind. I've sketched out round 10 before it disappears too far down Renata's blog page!

Slowly

Tatting the Renulek doily doesn't mesh well with baking bread and cleaning kitchen cupboards! But I'll get there eventually.

Half Way

I'm half way through round 9.

This doily has a home to go to, so I'm happy about that. My neighbour Dorie is going to ask her husband to make a wooden frame for it so that she can hang it on her wall.

(Waist)Coat of Many Colours

I've finished my waistcoat. I tried to take a selfie, but that didn't really work, so I took a photo in a mirror. In retrospect, I should've made the half circles on the front the same colour on each side so that together they made a whole circle. Ah well, that's a minor point, overall I'm very happy with it.

To recap, the motif pattern is Atty's Little Dots pattern, which is here . For putting them together to make a waistcoat, I take full responsibility. It was a great way to use up short bits of handspun wool left over from crocheting blankets. It'll be warm and should brighten any Winter day!

Working on Round 9

Round 9 looks quite tricky, so I used thread left on the shuttles to tat a practice repeat. That enabled me to check my scribbled diagram as well as work out where to swap shuttles and what size the picots should be. I've used too long a picot for the 'quad', it looks ugly, so I know to watch out for that.
I've made a start:

Texture

I like the texture created by crocheting with beads of two sizes.

Changing Tack

The waistcoat is very slow moving, so I thought perhaps it was time to take a break from it and do something else. I've been wanting to try beaded crochet ropes using different size beads. I was thinking of this picture that I first saw on Pinterest, though it turns out when I look at it again that it's not made with beads of different sizes! No matter. After a few false starts I got the hang of it, and I rather like the effect.

Taking Shape

My head boggles every now and then, but I think I have the front of my waistcoat more or less right. I'll need some half-hexagons to straighten out some of the lines. Now for the back...

Caterpillar Update

Remember the great big caterpillar we found? Steve Ogden from Wildlife Insight advised us to put some leaf mould in a container for the caterpillar to burrow into, in the hope that we will see the moth hatch out. The caterpillar duly burrowed beneath the leaf mould. Whether the moth will emerge before Winter, or wait until Spring, we don't know. Of course it may not hatch out at all, or it may hatch out and escape our beady eyes. So it's all a bit iffy. But so far, so good.

To The Point

I created two triangles for the front of my waistcoat. Now I'm joining them to the back. That means I'll be able to work right across, up to the armholes. I'm making this up as I go along, I hope it'll work!  (Scroll down a couple of posts to find a link to the Atty's dots pattern I'm using for the motifs).

Round 8

I've finished round 8 of the Renulek doily. It measures 28 cm/ 11 inches across now.

Joining The Dots

Atty's Little Dots are joined as you go. The process is a trifle laborious, it's true, but I really like the result. My plan is to make myself a waistcoat. The weather is still warm, but the days are getting shorter and Winter is on its way. I'll need a warm waistcoat! With pointy fronts, of course.

Dots

I found the perfect pattern to use very short pieces of coloured wool. It's called Atty's Little Dots and can be found here.  Each dot uses just over a metre/yard of yarn. The pattern uses a centre ring of three chain, but I've used a magic ring. It gives a bigger space to work in, while still finishing up with a neat centre. I learnt to do the magic ring when making amigurumi toys. I see when I investigate now that I've been making a double magic ring, which is fine. I'll continue to use it because it's stronger than the single version and the end doesn't have to be sewn in. Here  is a tutorial for several ways of making a magic ring.

Because I Can

Since I'd managed to work out how to crochet a half star hexagon,(or star half-hexagon)  I thought I might as well do so! So I filled in the spaces at the sides of my blanket. I had a few stars left over, so I recycled those. Two half hexagons use slightly more yarn than one whole one, but I had enough short pieces to make up the difference. I left the ends as zig zags. This is blanket is now ready to be posted off to New Zealand.