new beginnings

Most of you guessed it right when I blogged about this a couple of weeks ago: I’m making a blanket! :)

Not what you’d expect when you see my progress though…

A whole bunch of tiny yarn babies! This is how those big projects start. You begin with a couple of tiny circles, and soon they’ll grow into a full-sized picnic blanket. And by soon I mean probably not fast enough, and by not fast enough I mean that I’ll probably be hooking it till Christmas ;) My goal however is to have this puppy (and by puppy I mean largest dog EVER) finished this summer, so I can actually use it as a picnic blanket!

This is how I tackle large projects though. I like to do the math beforehand, so I know how many squares I have to make (in this case: 100). Then I sketched out some colour schemes, so I could calculate how many starting circles of each colour I need. What you see in these pictures is about half of all the circles I have to make. I like to finish everything row after row, so I’m making row 1 now for all the squares, then row 2 for all of them, then row 3 and so on. I sew in my ends after each row, because I really don’t want to be doing that at the end, when there’s a gazillion ends! Of course this is only necessary if you’re changing colours every row. If you’re only working in 1 colour, it’s much easier to just keep going.

In a few months I’ll be able to look back on these photos and say: “Look how cute they were back then!” ;)

I’m making this with Scheepjes Cotton 8 yarn. I’m using it double stranded with a 6mm hook, which is why I caked my skeins, so I’ll have two ends to work with (for those of you who asked). And the reason I’m using it double stranded is so it will take less time to hook up. Yep, I’m a lazy hooker! ;)

xo,
wink