birth-day present

I saw this other pregnant mama post about a blanket she was crochetting for her baby - made of granny-squares - and got totally inspired.

I love knitting and sewing, and have crochetted before - but like a billion years ago and only simple, simple rounds or something, can't even remember. So I started a hunt for instructions (easy enough to find), and then youtube'd for videos on how to perform the steps in the instructions, as they were totally unfamiliar to me (double crochette, single crochette, slip stitch...everything basically).

Through this I stumbled upon an awesome owl-granny square, and as I absolutely love owls (seems I'm totally unoriginal in this love by the way), I decided to incorporate it into the blanket. This led to more youtube-searching in order to be able to follow those instructions too (half double crochette, triple crochette).

[one of the squares in the blanket]

 

Did a test-run with some yarn from my mom to practice the skills, and found that I would need about 5 x 7 squares to get an 80 x 100 cm blanket (approximately). Saweeet. Totally doable.

After the test-run I went and bought some yarn in the colors I wanted, and went at her. After the first square, however, I realized I had not bought the right kind of thickness in the thread, as I was suddenly bumped up to a 7 x 9 squarer~. That's a lot of squares to crochette!

But on I went.

[WIP]

 

I did come across some problems with some of the owls. First off, they took looooooong. Not a problem so much, but I like to finish things quickly, and so it was more of a confirmation that I had made the right choice of not making a blanket with just owl grannies. And then there were the white owls - they looked kind of ghost-like or something (see pic above, top row second from the left), but Judge suggested a black dot in the middle of the eye, and wahbam, problem solved.

As I am a big fan of efficiency I am uber happy I stumbled upon some great ideas during my searches. For example, I followed this guy's instructions on how to weave the ends in as I went (so I wouldn't have a kazillion ends to sew in after), as well as used his method of completing things in stages (bunches of centers at a time, then coordinate it so I could do a certain color as much as possible, etc):

I also followed this lady's method of continuous connection, so I completed four out of five rounds on each square, and then did the last round in one go for all 63:

And lastly I used this method for the final boarder in order to try to get it smooth (partial success, partial fail, as my squares are not all the same size).

[Leona being a helpful big sister and testing out the finished masterpiece for me]

 

I have to admit I am quite happy with the final results. Yep yep. Pat on back.

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