I don’t count as a WIP the manly sock that’s been sitting half-knitted for months. It might end up being a Christmas present at this rate (!), but it doesn’t have any urgency to it so will get dug out at some point. Then I will try to work out where I was in the pattern without any notes, give up, frog it and start another one.

One WIP that is coming along very nicely indeed is the Blooming Flower Cushion I started a few weeks ago.

I have made it as wide as I want it, I think, and am now making the back. The size might change depending on whether it is too small for the cushion pad I’ve ordered. It was supposed to be a project to use up my cotton oddments, but I ended up buying a few balls of Rico Creative Cotton from Cucumberpatch to use as well. So much for destashing, but they work well and I have plans for the leftovers.

I am really loving crochet at the moment. I find it much more enjoyable to crochet cushions than knitting them; there’s a mountain of unblogged, half-started knitted cushion covers in my past that would make your hair stand on end! I am even feeling buoyed up enough to consider crocheting an entire blanket as I’ve been put off knitting them for life..!

Something I’m not enjoying is Lauriel. I started it a while ago and clearly didn’t get very far.

I think I haven’t done the increases properly. They’re worked with yarnovers, which is fine when it’s on every other row, but when I got to the every fourth row increases, I didn’t want to lose the yarnovers. So I did them and then decreased afterwards/beforehand but I think I got into a bit of a mess with the whole thing. I’m going to examine finished ones on Ravelry with a magnifying glass and see what they look like. Though quite honestly I’m falling out of love with it and am tempted to just frog and cast on for Myrtle which I was gifted ages ago, and although it isn’t a hoodie, is still light and lacy.

But the cushion comes first! And there’s that lovely buttery yellow cotton I bought last week to be used.

I picked up a copy of Simplicity 2606 at my local rubbish department store a few weeks ago when I had to buy extra white acrylic for the cheerful squares cushion. It was reduced to a measly four pounds (the pattern, not the yarn, although that itself was close to three pounds just for some Sirdar Bonus DK, which is a whole other issue!).

And when I saw the yellow butterfly fabric online, it looked so cheerful, that I figured that would be the perfect summery skirt all for me. But when it arrived it was very yellow indeed. It had looked a lot softer on my monitor but in real life it’s brighter, bolder and not really me. I think I’d be in danger of looking like a children’s TV presenter if I wore it.

So, Rose gets something instead and I get to choose more fabric for me. She is just small enough to fit in Burda 9652:

which is just about in my comfort zone as it doesn’t involve buttonholes – I’m going to make version A with the leg ties. If we ever get any sunshine, it will be perfect for summer.

At least I have sunshine-y fabric and yarn to brighten up the day.

The ducks in today’s post are brought to you by Rose, who clearly felt that pictures of a big blue blanket needed a spot of colour.

The giant baby blanket is finally done. The last few inches were hard going as it weighed a ton and was a pain to turn every time I finished a row. But I love the end result and I’m sure it will be appreciated by whoever gets it.

The pattern was deliciously simple, although reading the wrong side of the work with dark yarn was hard going and I did have to tink a fair few times because I can’t count. I got into a routine of promising myself the treat of the easy garter stitch sections as a reward for the stocking stitch!

In the end the blanket measured approximately 40 x 40 inches (just over 1 metre square!) after blocking. That was a feat in itself as I had to commandeer the bath to soak it in! Though as the yarn is mostly acrylic, it dried quickly.

Now I just have to parcel it up and send it on its way.

My biggest crochet FO to date! It’s only a very basic granny square cushion, but it’s taught me how to change colours, sew lots of squares together and, most importantly, taught me not to be afraid of colour!

The original pattern used a wide variety of random colours, of which I have plenty in my yarn stash. So rather than try to go for a particular palette, I picked the colours almost entirely randomly. I tried to have one dark and one light colour per square, but in order to ensure that no two squares used the same two colours, I had to compromise a bit. There are colours on that cushion that I’d never dreamed of putting together, but somehow with all the white to soften them, they work. And I love my cushion.

The back is just a big white granny square which got very boring to make after a while because I wanted to get on with finishing off the cushion, but it was done and then I just joined the back and the front with double crochet (US single crochet, I think). The pattern directions were a little vague about joining, so I just went with my own thing.

Actually, the pattern was really helpful on how to make each individual granny square, with step-by-step photos and as a beginner crocheter, this was really useful. But in nit-picking mode, the directions for the back were to make a big white granny square, but there were no instructions on how to start each new round – because obviously it was different to how you’d do it for a square with a new colour on each round. In the end, I Googled and found a brilliant video on YouTube (that’s the lefty version because I am a lefty, but there’s a “regular” one as well!) and was all sorted.

It’s funny. I’ve wanted to knit things like cushions and blankets for years, but never got around to it and then I get the crochet bug and I’ve got one and a half cushions done already! There’s probably a moral in that somewhere.

but it’s so grey indoors that the photo has come out all fuzzy. I was hoping to do a FO post today, but will leave them until the weather improves and I can get better pictures.

At least I have a House Full of Cake to lift the mood. Yesterday I became the mother of a 14 year old:

And there’s a quarter of a cake left for me to polish off while everyone is out.

As spring is in the air in the northern hemisphere and those in the southern hemisphere start setting their sights for the arrival of winter, a lot of crocheters and knitters find that their crafting changes along with their wardrobe. Have a look through your finished projects and explain the seasonality of your craft to your readers. Do you make warm woollens the whole year through in preparation for the colder months, or do you live somewhere that never feels the chill and so invest your time in beautiful homewares and delicate lace items. How does your local seasonal weather affect your craft?

I think today’s topic is extremely interesting as it’s making me look closely at how I knit.

I definitely knit seasonally, although not because my knitting needs change over the year. It’s more that I appear to start the year with good intentions, run out of steam mid-year and then have a mad knitting rush before the year is over!

Winter is definitely my Ultimate Knitting Season. The cold weather and dark evenings give me the urge to wrap everyone up in warm knitted things, and hats, socks and mittens just fly off my needles. I even managed to complete three pairs of man size socks last November/December:

because I seemed to be under some sort of Winter Knitting Influence. Though I’ve found that over the past year that my knitting seems to have gone in phases, where I knit the same of one type of thing over and over again and then switch to something else. You’d think I’d like a bit of variety, but no.

Right now I’m enjoying crocheting cushions which at least aren’t seasonal.

But that’s the beauty of crafting. There’s no law that says you have to do it one particular way!

I don’t know what I’d do if I didn’t have a convenient shrubbery in the garden so that I can hop outside in between showers and take photos of shawls.

This FO post is seriously delayed as the shawl was finished at the end of January, but I took an age to get around to blocking and it needs to be sent off asap for a swap. You know when you think you have loads of time to do something and then time suddenly creeps up on you? Hopefully it won’t take too long to reach its destination!

Anyway, Holden is a lovely pattern. Very simple, top-down triangle – my favourite sort of shawl! – and works brilliantly with variegated yarn. I modified it by working an extra repeat of the feather and fan pattern because I had yarn to spare and it was looking a bit small. However, this then left me without enough yarn to work the picot edging, so I did a simple stretchy bind off and pinned out the edging to form points instead.

I do wish I’d researched the pattern a bit more before I started knitting, though, because there’s a strange quirk in the lace pattern. This is hard to describe in writing, but I shall try! Basically, instead of the feather and fan being worked across the whole row, the centre of each row has an extra couple of stitches either side of the fan. It’s not overly noticeable, but interrupts the flow of knitting and is easily resolved if you just increase fewer stitches in the first place. Just a little oddity.

The yarn was perfect for the pattern as it really fought against any remotely detailed lace pattern I tried to use it for. I know I will probably knit it again to use some of the other more colourful yarns in my stash!

Colour is one of our greatest expressions of ourselves when we choose to knit or crochet, so how do you choose what colours you buy and crochet or knit with. Have a look through your stash and see if there is a predominance of one colour. Do the same with your finished projects – do they match? Do you love a rainbow of bright hues, or more subdued tones. How much attention do you pay to the original colour that a garment is knit in when you see a pattern? Tell readers about your love or confusion over colour.

If you have been reading this blog for even a short length of time, you will probably have gathered that I love purple.

In general colour scares me, though, as I don’t trust my judgement on what colours go well together. I’m loathed to deviate from the given colours for stranded projects in particular. These mittens still bother me:

I thought that green and purple would work well together, but they just blended into a big colourful splodge. (They’re supposed to look like this!)

So, I am working on my phobia with the help of my newly-found crochet passion:

because I do have a lot of yarn oddments in my stash that need using up! The granny square cushion in particular is a complete wild stab in the dark, as I’ve really thrown caution to the wind and use up all the weirdly coloured acrylic DK that I’ve somehow accumulated. The pattern is from Issue 13 of Mollie Makes:

With the original cushion using a very wide range of colours, I got the confidence to put together some very “interesting” combinations and hopefully when it’s done, it won’t make everyone recoil in horror.

Firstly, Flora is now available in Portuguese, after Valeria messaged me on Ravelry asking me if she could translate it. This makes me supremely happy, as it’s the first time one of my patterns has been translated into another language.

The startitis I’d been suffering with needs to be brought in to check. I tried listing all my WIPs to shame me into finishing them, but that was before the crochet mania. I’ve deleted a few and will regroup and restart again when I have a clean slate. The brilliance of knitting is that it can, in the main, be unravelled and reused and nothing is set in stone.

My new-found obsession with crochet started when I was looking for inspiration in small projects that I could finish quickly and make me feel as if I’d achieved something. I’ve toyed with making granny squares for a few years now, but nothing was ever finished and being able to do one stitch isn’t really very versatile. Ideally, my first ever finished crochet project should really get its own special post, but I’ll make up for it with future ones.

And voilà! A teeny little flower brooch which took about an hour to make and has taken pride of place on my jacket. And I’ve had more comments about it than for any of my knitted hats, shawls or scarves, as well.

I have started using Pinterest. I’ve had the “Pin It” option on here for a while but didn’t actually use it myself. But it’s time for Rose to move into her own room, which currently looks like this:

after being vacated by Henry. It’s lovely to have a blank canvas (other than the red curtains which are staying) and I’ve started a board to gather together ideas for the room. Hopefully, once Rose has moved in, I can then start on decorating my own bedroom, which has never been done in the eight years that we’ve been here! I suspect MrB would be less keen on having a very “pretty” bedroom, so I will just live vicariously through Rose’s room.

I think that’s me done for now. I have plenty of WIP photos to share, but they can wait for another post as this is extremely long. I hope to get back into blogging regularly now. so promise it won’t be too long before the next update.