Bably Boy Blue Dreams Blanket Progress

Hello Friends,

I hope you are doing well. First I need to say I've been having problems posting comments to some blogs. I've been visiting you all and trying to post, sometimes I even tried several times per day but when I submit my comment disappears. Is anyone else having similar problems? For blogger blogs that have a separate window open to write comments I am able to submit. Any help is appreciated. I do enjoy reading you blogs so if you have not heard from me in over a week, I have been visiting and trying to comment.
Thank you for all of your lovely comments on my inifinity scarf. I am working on a tutorial/pattern and hope to have it up later this week. You comments make me want to make more and more :)

Remember a couple posts ago I had many squares but did not weave in the ends yet? Well I sat down and wove all of those ends in before making any new squares. It felt so much better to arrange them without the ends flapping around.

I also hooked out the last group of squares I needed. I really love this pattern because you can make a square in five minutes so if you only have 15 minutes to work on some crochet you can make 3 squares! As you can see, the blanket is 8 squares by 10 squares, which I think will be a good size for covering a baby in the stroller/pram, carseat etc.

Once I connect the squares with the Angie's zip zap method I will write up the statistics such as the color names. I have 13 different colors in there. Sometimes arranging the pattern is the hardest part!

Has anyone else made one of these little granny square blankets too? If so, please share your link, I would love to see them. Don't forget to check back later this week for the tutorial/pattern for the infinity scarf.
Have a fabulous Tuesday,
xo Susan

Autumn is really starting in Florida!!

Hello Lovely Blogland Friends,

Another long week has passed and the weekend is here! As usual, I hope to spend my weekend crocheting away. Autumn does not always make an entrance here in Southwest Florida but this weekend we will experience our first bit of real autumn goodness. The humidity is dropping and the temperature is not supposed to reach 90 this coming week -- which means the temp is dropping. The temperature is supposed to be in the 60s during the early morning hours.

Earlier this week I showed you a sneak peak at the Infinity Scarf I started. Well, the scarf is still not finished, but I did make good progress. The first picture is one whole skein of the yarn. Hopefully the whole scarf can be made with 2 skeins and based on my calculations it should be just right.

Starting on the second skein... (same color yarn -- Arcadia)

Remember, I am using Lion Brand Amazing yarn in the color "Arcadia" and so far I really like the color variation in the yarn.  I am surprised there was so much blue in the beginning of the yarn because the rest of the colors change sooner.

I also started making squares in blues, greens and yellow for a baby boy blanket I am calling Blue Dreams. I loved my stained glass white blanket so much that I decided to use the same pattern for a baby boy blanket.

I think an 8 by 10 block will be just the right size for the baby to cover with in his stroller/pram for the winter.

As you can see I have not been waving in the ends as I go like usual. I am not sure what came over me, I just kept making squares and did not have my small hook near by to weave them in. So I will have to spend a few hours weaving them in this weekend. Surprisingly I am not dreading it, the ends weave in nicely on these little squares since they are too compact.

I hope you are able to have a happy hooky weekend. Enjoy the change in weather and autumn colors starting to appear if you are up north. For those of you down under I hope you have some spring fun.
xoxo Susan

Statistics for Stained Glass Blanket - White

Good Morning Lovelies,
I was hoping to post this much earlier this week but you know how that goes. Time slipped away.  This morning I am all ready to get working on finishing up some WIPs. This is my weekend of working on WIPs!

I was able to get outside and take some outdoor photos of the blanket in natural light but my lens would not stop fogging up from the humidity so I do not have as many presentable ones as I hoped.

Foggy Photo from Humidity

Here are the stats on the blanket:

Size: 47 inches by 29 inches
Yarn: Lion Brand Vanna's Choice and Vanna Baby
Number Colors: 22 colors plus white = 23
Estimated time to complete:  21 hours and 33 minutes (1280 minutes)

I better get to work on my WIPs so I can have some finished pieces to show you by the end of this weekend. Have a fabulous weekend and Happy Autumn!
xoxo Susan

Stained Glass Blanket, Starting to Connect

Hello Friends,

Thank you for stopping by. First though, I need to thank Eileen over at Crochet Attic for the Blog Award. I am so grateful to be awarded something for my blog. I know I am supposed to say some things about myself and pass the award along. I am going to do this in my next post, so bare with me. Knowing people enjoy hearing and seeing what I am making is very nice. I have been blogging for almost 8 months and I am so glad to have met so many wonderful people both crocheters and non-crocheters from this experience. I learn so much about the every day lives and culture of people across the my own state, country, and worldwide. So thank you very much Eileen!

Since my last post, I've been slowly trying to connect my pieces of stained glass (not really stained glass, but you know what I mean!).  Since I am not sure how big I will make this blanket I am connecting some rows so I can gauge the size. Right now I am making rows of 16 squares.

I started to connect some of the squares, using Angie over at Le Monde Sucrette's zig zag connecting pattern. This began over the weekend and I did take a break to go to the beach with J. We visited Sanibel Island, FL for a lovely day at the beach.

The zig zags will look better once the opposite rows are connected. Right now in between each square there is a space because they are only connected on two sides rather than four.

Organizing the colors so two colors do not show up right next to each other is always tricky. You would think with such a variety of colors, this would be easy, but I am always amazed at how tricky this can be.

Driving home from work tonight the sun was setting with beautiful pink colors across the sky. I tried to capture this on camera but could not get a shot that looked like it did in person. You can see a little bit of the colors in the sky.

So far I have four rows connected. I spread these out on our living room coffee table on Sunday and they are still there. Luckily J has not even commented on them being in the way or asked when they will be connected and removed from the table. He is so wonderful!

One of my friends is expecting a baby in the beginning of November and decided not to find out the sex of the baby. So, I am not able to make a girl or boy blanket which makes me anxious. I decided I did not want to make a yellow one, or even green because if it is a girl I like to have everything look extra girly. So, I was thinking maybe, just maybe this might make a gender neutral baby blanket? What do you think?

Using all of these lovely colors has me already thinking about my next project. I do not want to get too far ahead of myself, I want to finish this project before starting another one. I hope your week is going well and you are able to sneak in some crochet time :)
Have a fabulous day,
xoxo Susan

Stained Glass Blanket Update

Hello Lovelies,

Welcome to my new followers, and welcome back to my not so new followers. Thank you all for stopping by to see what I am up to. Another busy week has passed and the wonderful weekend is here to enjoy. I was able to make some progress on my stained glass blanket but not as much as I wanted. This weekend I plan to finish all of the squares and start putting some lines together. I cannot wait to see how it looks put together.

Right now I am making 7 to 8 of each color. I am still not sure exactly how big the blanket will be. I know I want it to be at least 10 by 16 for a total of 160 squares. I may add some additional colors. I think there are two or three more colors I am not using that I could add from the Lion Brand Vanna's Choice and Vanna Baby that would go well with the blanket.

Here are all of my colors so far...

I am hoping my next posting will have some rows of squares connected!!! My weekend will hopefully be filled with reading and crocheting, I cannot think of anything that sounds better than that!
I hope you had a fabulous Friday and are ready for a relaxing weekend too.
xo Susan

Stained Glass Blanket

Good Morning Lovelies,

Yesterday the day started out bright and sunny and then some clouds came and lingered on with some rain for almost the whole day, and I enjoyed every single minute of it. I spend the day working on my little squares for my new blanket. I decided to call it this one Stained Glass. All of the different colors remind me of stained glass windows so there you have it.

You can see I am weaving in my ends as I go. I find this to be so much more enjoyable when I near the end and do not have that dreadful feeling of being almost done but still have to spend hours weaving the ends in.

A few colors are still missing. I may have to pop over to the craft store today and get a regular orange color and a regular purple, maybe a magenta as well. I am using Lion Brand Vanna's Choice and Vanna Baby, 100% acrylic, this is the yarn I use for most of my projects.

So for now I am working on stacking up the colors. I have not decided how big this will be yet. I do not want it to be too small that it will not get any use. My main goal was to use this as a way to de-stash but as I already said I need to go buy some colors I already ran out of! Angie's version for her daughter was 10 by 16 squares, I am thinking maybe 12 by 16 which is a total of 192 squares, or 13 by 16 for a total of 208 squares.

This is a holiday weekend here in the USA called Labor Day. Time has gone by so quickly I did not realize the holiday weekend was already here. The holiday weekend means no school Monday! I hope you are having a great weekend and a great holiday weekend for those of you in the USA.

Have a fabulous Sunday,
xoxo Susan

New Blanket WIP!

Hello Friends,

Did you see Angie's latest finished project? I LOVE the pattern for this blanket and luckily she shared her pattern with us here. As soon as I saw this finished blanket, I knew it had to be my next blanket. The colors look great and I love the technique Angie used to connect all of the squares. This is the perfect project for using up some of my yarn stash.

I am hoping to use all of the colors I have in my cabinet. I will show a photo of my cabinet later because the lighting was not good for a photo today. Since I had some pink yarn out, I started off with pink.

I started with some pink and added some blue and green so far. I will count to see how many different colors I have in my stash so I know an approximate number of each color I need to make.

Just 3 colors so far

Not the color pattern I will be using but you know how I like to lay stuff out!

I plan to use a lot of different colors and do not plan on having a specific color pattern in the blanket.

Before starting the blanket, I made a hexagon from Bunny Mummy's tutorial here. The pattern is a Coats and Clark pattern that Bunny Mummy adjusted and with their permission, made a tutorial for it. I love the colors she used in her blanket. I was trying out some autumn colors. I am still looking for the hexagon pattern I saw used in a scarf with autumn colors. Don't you hate it when you can't find something great you saw, even when you know you saved the link somewhere.

The colors in the photo do not look as nice as it does in person (my lighting was not great). I am not sure if this is the hexagon I will use for the fall colors scarf.
Hopefully I can crank out a lot of colorful rounded squares this weekend.
Have a fabulous Friday,
xoxo Susan

Thunder and Lightning

Hello Friends,

Welcome to all of my new followers! And thank you for all of my followers who have been following for a while :) I have been working on finishing up my granny garden blanket but every time I want to take some photos to share, it starts to get like this...

A summer storm coming on.
You can see the rain falling from the clouds on the left side

I enjoy the rain here in Florida because it is a nice break from the constant sunny days we have here. The sound of the rain is nice and it makes me feel like I must curl up and read a book, or crochet the day away. When the sun is out I usually feel like I should be out and about doing things.

So, since I wasn't able to get some natural light, I had to settling on the lights inside of the house and the camera flash because I really wanted to share my additional rows on the granny garden. Although the blanket is now eight squares by ten squares and sufficient to be a throw blanket, I want to make it ten by ten so it is a little bit bigger. I do look forward to finish this so I can check one more project off my list.


Right now with 8 by 10 circles

I am almost done with the last two rows of circles, then I will just have to doing the outer edge with a connect as you go. One of my friends saw some of my baby hats and sent me an email to see if I could make a custom hat for her daughter's first birthday! I am working on it right now and will share pictures once it is complete. I hope your week is starting off well.
xoxo Susan

Granny Gardening...

Hello Everyone,

Although this is my first week of summer vacation, I have been busy working on research proposals for an upcoming conference this coming academic year. I have been getting some crochet in though, I just haven't been updating you accordingly. Do you remember my granny garden blanket? Well I am expanding the lapghan to a larger blanket. I loved all of the color granny circles turned square when I first started reading blogs back in January. As a born again crocheter I wanted to make all of the great projects everyone had been working on for the last few years so I made several lap afghans to satisfy my desire to try so any of the great patterns all of you out there have been using!

Granny Garden

I also got to the point where I just needed a break from weaving in all those ends and making all of those little circles. This past week I have been making some more circles to add a few more rows to the blanket. I also used the connect-as-you-go technique.

We've also had some excitement in our backyard the last few days. Do you know what this is?

I bet you have an idea now!

 A small alligator has made its way to the backyard pond. This is very common in Florida, but we have not had one lurking around our pond in a few years. With several small children around our street, all of the neighbors were concerned. Fish and Wildlife officers will remove alligators from community or public areas if the alligator is over 4 ft long or if it is at least 18 inches and considered is a danger/nuisance.


Small Alligator in our Backyard

 We did not see the alligator today, so we are not sure if s/he decided to move to another pond or if Fish and Wildlife came and removed it. So that was our backyard excitement this week!

I hope your week has been moving along nicely. As I said, I have been busy crocheting so stop back tomorrow for another project and another post!

Have a fabulous Friday,

xoxo Susan

Granny Growing

Hello Friends,

I am very lucky to be spending my Sunday crocheting my granny for Angie's giant granny challenge. My  goal is to keep the granny bright and cheery! So far, I am very happy with the progress. Sometimes when I use a darker color I get nervous it may not work well with the others but so far so good.

19 Rows Granny Square

25 Rows Granny Squares

Folded Granny Square

I am always amazed at the way the outside row makes the square look very different. When blue was the outside row the square had a whole different look, and the red made it look even more different. One of the things I do not enjoy about making giant granny's is the more rows you add the more time it takes to complete a row.
I feel like I had a refreshing weekend and I am looking forward to the week ahead. We are in our last week of class for the summer semester!!!

I hope you had a lovely weekend,
xoxo Susan

Weekend Wonderfuls

Good Morning Lovelies,
The sun is peaking out from behind some clouds and I up am ready to go this Saturday morning. Yesterday I wove all of my ends in on my granny garden blanket and took some photos. I think the blanket is at least a third of the way done, maybe a little more than one third. The progress is similar to my ripple. So I guess I can say they still have a way to go before being finished. Yesterday I was reading on the raverly message board about having multiple WIPs so you do not get so sick of them you never finish. Apparently I do that too! Today I will try to make a dent into more circles for the granny garden.

My two Lucy projects that got me obsessed with crocheting: ripple and circles to squares!!

 A little collection of what I have worked on the last month. I forgot to put my granny stripe in there. I put the granny stripe into a bag to take to see baby McKenna (I can't go away without a WIP to work on!) and forgot to bring it back out. Well there you have it! I bought my first batch of yarn on Friday, January 14th and went to work on the ripple, and here I am less than 60 days later with lots of goodies!
Have a fabulous day
XOXO Susan