I didn’t dare look at when I posted last.. I know it’s been a while. Between then and now though, I’ve managed to find work to make an honest <snort> living.. get this, I now have three different jobs that almost make a full work week. And as a bonus I’ve managed somehow to keep them off my weekends, so when Saturday comes and I’ve done all my laundry and running around etc I fall into bed a little tired. Sunday however, I wake up and start diving into my wool stash (don’t go upstairs when you get in hun.. just trust me).

I guess since an idea to use up all my part bags of purples has been mulling around in my brain for a while, and my recent foray back into crocheting (thanks for your patience Natalie!) has gotten me wanting to practice, I had the genius brainwave to do both at the same time. This morning ~after only a little frustration~ I just about mastered the wave pattern. I had some help from a pretty cool crocheting book I picked up in a charity shop a few months ago (thank you Compendium of Crochet Techniques by Jan Eaton). The first idea that came to mind was to make it one big piece and stripy, but I would rather not spend hours trying to work out how much I have and therefore how wide and long I can make it without it turning into a mutant Dr Who scarf (as tempting as that is.. maybe next time).

I quite liked the look of the block of colour at the bottom of the top sample (one wave pattern repeat wide), so the logical thing seemed to be just make blocks and arrange them later. Though to save some sewing (and I confess, since I hate sewing up knitted items) I can make alternating strips of blocks of colour and just mattress-stitch them together.

I think the colours and textures look kinda groovy together considering some of these wools have been in my stash for <cough> years.

The next tough decision was how large to make the blocks. Since the wave pattern is in multiples of 12 sts + 3 the samples I made are 24 (15.5cm), 36 (24cm) and 48 sts (30cm) and laid them out together on a piece of A3 paper. Perhaps it would have been better to finish at least one block but I’m far too impatient for that, I’ll just let my imagination fill in the blanks. After some to-ing and fro-ing (and asking OH who has no clue what I want him to tell me (it’s like flipping a coin, you just ask and see how you feel about the answer, or try to catch yourself pushing towards a particular option – there you go, problem solved.)) it turned out I was leaning toward the second size up from the bottom. The bottom size is also nice but my thought was if I don’t have enough to make it big enough, I will maybe end up with an odd-shaped blankie. I’ll have to see how it goes. In the meantime, forging ahead with the 36 sts blocks. I shall post again soon..

Caio x