Remember those [clandestine references to secret project] that started showing up in mid September?
Yep, I learned how to crochet and made a whole blanket. As a Christmas gift for Fluffy (who reads the blog on occasion, hence the mystery).
It started out, as many things do, with a YouTube recommendation. I like watching people make things. The "thing" itself doesn't matter all that much, I just like to see the process of somebody making a thing. Or occasionally completely fail to make a thing, but schadenfreude exists.
I'd also looked up some crochet tutorials for Ma at certain points. So these two things combined in the middle of August when YouTube sent me in the direction of Michelle Jasek, crochet enthusiast, thrifter and all around late 70's, early 80's viber. And her whole yellow, orange and brown aesthetic is very much Fluffy's vibe.
Because Fluffy is, definitively, an Autumn.
But I watched a number of Jasek's videos, and the idea of crochet kind of got under my skin.
Weirdly though, it's one of those things that I've watched videos about and it just looked like literal witchcraft to me. Those tutorials for Ma... yeah, I watched those and went "WTF... and also, how?". I also thought, well, it can't be THAT hard. And Ma knows how to do it.
So, on September 9, after shopping, she taught me how.
I'd asked Ma to teach me how to do a thing... which, you know, is both dangerous and turnabout is, in fact, fair play. It went... about as well as I expected it to go initially, which is completely badly, and rather than being frustrated, I kind of lost my mind a tiny bit.
But I kinda got it. And then I didn't... and then I really didn't... and it was a very amusing disaster.
And then we went to Spotlight and bought things so it can be a disaster later. Or I can practice it being less of a disaster. I don't know.
Which is very true. I couldn't get my head around it at first. But it was also hilarious instead of frustrating, which was good. When we went to Spotlight I found what I've come to call "Swamp Trash" yarn (it's actually, I discovered later, Red Heart Super Saver Yarn in the colour "Fall"). And the plan started to form to make A Thing For Fluffy. With "blanket" being the top contender.
It didn't start out... spectacularly. After Ma left, I messed around a little, just trying to get the feel of things without having to actually worry about making anything that was, you know, functional. It was more getting my brain and my hands used to the movements and how to hold the yarn and all of that.
They're very... "freeform expressionist crochet".
The upside is that you can just pull on the yarn and unravel (or, as I learned, "frog", which is an unofficial term that comes from the idea of "ribbit" and "rip it" sounding similar) the whole thing and start over.
I will say, if I knew then what I know now, I would have played around with different yarn, because this stuff was the hardest to work with of all the yarn I used.
That Sunday I tried a little swatch of single crochet and ended up with the wonky ass thing on the left... then found a tutorial on Moss Stitch, which is really beautiful. But as my very first project, and with that particular yarn... not great. Not terrible, but I think there are only about three places where the Moss Stitch actually looks like it's supposed to.
That ended up getting frogged eventually too, because I needed the yarn.
But by then I had other yarn and started looking up actual tutorials, which lead me to this Bella Coco tutorial on granny squares. Ma had attempted to get me to granny squares in our initial training session, but it was too much too soon, but the tutorial walked me there.
The very first attempt is on the left. After I did that one, I watched a couple of other tutorials and refined my technique, so on September 17 I set up a spreadsheet, and started on the first of what would be a LOT of granny squares.
It took a while before I got my eye in. I did the first dozen in the yellow before switching over to the Swamp Trash yarn, then switching back to the yellow. On the right up there is one of my original squares at the bottom and one of the last yellow squares I made once I knew what I was doing at the top. There's a mild size discrepancy... that comes into play later.
But I had a plan... well, technically I had six plans and a couple of possible plans...
Because what's better than working out how you're going to arrange your solid colour granny squares than a Google docs spreadsheet.
Once again, in a perfect world, and if I knew then what I know now, I might have done The X, but I don't know if the actual blanket would have had the same slight optical illusion to it that the plan has. I also really liked the randomness of The Random. Which I know isn't completely random, but I like it anyway.
Of course, in a perfect world, I would have used a slightly smaller hook size and also made a 12 by 12 blanket and not an 11 by 13... but I also was limited by the amount of Swamp Trash yarn and I also wanted a "centre square" to the pattern.
There were a variation of The Flow and The Stripe where two colours went left to right and the other two colours went right to left. But I never liked those as much.
So, by that point I had five different colours of yarn. I did consider doing squares in the final grey colour, but decided that it would look better if they were fastened together with it.
I also got a lot faster as time went on. My first two squares took about 75 minutes per square. By the time I finished a month later (a little over 94 consecutive hours of crochet), I was down to just under 30 minutes per square.
And I had 145 finished squares. Plus I'd also unpicked 17 of my original squares and redone them so they were the better size. I came out of that with a bag of leftover yarn ends.
There they all are. And you can very clearly see the difference in the thickness of the yarn I was using, which is what happens when you pick your yarn out of the remnants bin because it's essentially cheaper than regular yarn and comes in great big fat skeins.
I think the green was the nicest to work with. Plus that colour of green is very much my kinda green.
I started out with 400g of each yarn (because that's the way the big bags of remnant yarn comes), which amounted to four skeins each of the yellow, beige and green and three of the Swamp Trash. Because that's slightly heavier. And at the end of the granny squares I essentially had a leftover skein of the other three colours. Which makes sense.
I also had been doing, at a minimum, three squares per night. But I averaged about five. Basically, as I got better at it and it took less time, I did more per night.
By this point, I wasn't sure how I was going to fasten them together, but I had decided on The Spiral design, because if I didn't have enough of the grey yarn (spoiler alert, I didn't, it didn't matter, I got more), that was a pattern that was still a pattern but wouldn't be ruined if I skipped the last row.
I could have tried a couple of the other patterns, but, honestly, when I laid The Spiral out on my bed, I was pretty much sold. What's funny is that I didn't actually realise when I originally made it was that it's just The Diamond with the last quarter changed.
I also didn't feel completely comfortable stitching it together or doing a single crochet or doing slip stitching or any of the other common blanket joining options I kept finding.
Because there had to be a join method out there that was basically just the same thing I already knew how to do, namely, more granny clusters. And then I found Roz over at Play Hooky With Me. She had the answer I'd been looking for.
So I stared putting the blanket together. I'll be honest, for most of the first row I was back to "you know nothing Jon Snow" territory...
We started with the World's Most Tragic Scarf (above right)...
And then it kept growing and growing and growing and growing...
It's also fun, because Fluffy is on Fluffy's Grand Adventure right now and he touches base occasionally with photos or updates... so I know that the very first row of the blanket took place while he was at Disneyland and sending me photos of it.
It took about three hours total to crochet each row of granny squares then crochet along the bottom edge to seal them all in. And after every row I would lay it out on my bed and go... "I did a thing", be vaguely impressed with myself, then fold it up and put it away for the night.
Also, it was about this time, as they say, that our intrepid hero (dat's me!) realised something... I kept looking at the colours and thinking "I really like this, they're really nice colours..." and then early one morning it occurred to me...
I was basically making a Wordle themed blanket by accident. Well, Wordle plus Swamp Trash.
Which, honestly, it's not the worst thing in the world, because Fluffy and I have been playing Wordle and messaging each other our daily results since January of 2022 (well, right up until he went travelling).
So... we'll file that under "happy little accident".
Speaking of accidents...
The day after I had finished the row in the previous set of photos, I did a whole row, got to the end, was going to join it to the previous row and saw the corner in the photo on the left. Which is bad. Because there should be two clusters in that corner, just like the outer yellow row.
Somehow I missed it and only put one in.
But I'd already attached the whole entire next row... so I thought to myself... "well, fuck... but, you know, it's fine, just attach it together and move on. So I finished the bottom of that row, laid the blanket out on the bed, looked at it and went... "oh, it'll do" and folded it up for the night.
And couldn't stop thinking about it.
Cue the following day where I did the frog thing. Because I couldn't leave it like that.
The thing about crochet, the base, fundamental thing, is that it's basically just really artistically tangled string. String that untangles really easily if you pull on a loose thread. It's literally that cartoon trope that we all remember where somebody gets their sweater caught on a nail and the entire thing unravels in seconds.
That.
So it took literal seconds to undo over three hours of work. The shot on the right is the aftermath.
Also, when I got to the end of second to last row, and went to attach a green square, I discovered that it had a small fuck up in it (I did a single stitch instead of three stitches in one of the clusters for... some unknown reason). So, I grabbed a different square, put that one aside and later that night I unpicked the last row of the green square and redid it. Because I'd come THIS far, I wasn't going to accept random fixable errors that late in the game.
The putting together phase took 14 days... or 48 consequent hours.
And that includes finishing the unfinished side and doing a second row of stitches around the whole border of the blanket to make the edge the same width as the line between squares.
Thus, after 145 consecutive hours, I had a whole-ass blanket.
I did have a moment where I looked at the finished product and said, aloud, to my empty apartment and/or the blanket... "who am I to just go and make a whole-ass blanket... who the hell do I think I am?", but, you know, in a joyfully incredulous way.
I made a blanket. A big blanket too. It's not quite the same size as my Queen size quilt, but it's not far off. It's maybe somewhere between Double and Queen sized. And it looks damn good.
There's a couple of small errors, but nothing egregious. I'm also really happy with the results. And because I'm writing this up the day after I finished it (3 November), I now have to wait until Board Game Christmas before I can give it to him.
And I have to find another project...
[Post Christmas Update]
It was a great success. And I worked on presents for other people too including amigurumi octopuses, a dice bag, cat toys, stress toys and a pair of earrings. Which were all also great successes.
And my next major project is going to be a cardigan for me, which I got a whole lot of yarn for at Christmas.
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