Drum roll please…

After making my sister the Eclectic Mix large granny blanket for Christmas last year, I vowed to make myself one to keep. After starting it towards the beginning of the year, working on it alongside my granny stripe blanket and half heartedly picking it up and putting it down many times this year I am ecstatic to say that I have finally finished it. In the end it actually pipped the granny stripes blanket to the post for being finished first. The granny stripes blanket was actually finished except for a border as far back as August but after umming and ahhing over what to do for the border I turned my attention to my squares blanket in the meantime.

It has been a fair while since my Let the joining commence… post back in September but hey ho, its here now. Without any further ado, drum roll please, here it comes…

I love love love it! I love that it is so bright and colourful and yet fresh at the same time with all the white. Much as I loved the original eclectic mix large granny square blanket, I wanted to do this one slightly different, one reason being that I don’t like making 2 things the same, the second being I wanted chunkier white spaces between the colours and 3rd, I just couldn’t face the thought of making lots of 10 round granny squares again! Lazy I know!

The process:

I made 42 6 round granny squares from stash yarn, most were random bits left over from previous blankets and some stylecraft special dk left from the granny stripes blanket but I honestly couldn’t tell you now which colours were which now.

After making the squares, I bordered them each with 2 rows of white (using a treble stitch on each of the stitches rather than grouped in 3’s as for the granny squares themselves).

Then ‘borrowed’ the join as you go method from Lucy of Attic 24  to join them and add another row of white.

I really do love it and despite being only finished a couple of days ago, it has already been put to good use for snuggles in front of the tv.

Whilst I do love making blankets for other people it is so lovely to be able to keep this one for ourselves. The only other one I made and kept was a large single granny made in browns and reds to match our living room. I used to think that everything needed to match but have since embraced colour much more and am more than happy to have a bright, eclectic blanket to snuggle up under on cold winter days.

Since finishing this blanket I got a taste for finishing things and that combined with having a little more crafty time in the half term holidays, means that I have now actually finished my granny stripe blanket too. Yippee.

Right, I’m off for more blanket snuggles, watch this space for my granny stripe blanket unveiling in a few days.

Karen x

More techy problems and lots to think about

On Monday, 3 weeks since my previous post I decided I was going to catch up with my blogging. Imagine my horror when all I saw was error 404, my blog had gone! I’m not massively good with complicated techy things such as websites and didn’t really have a clue what to do. I spent 2 days procrastinating, considering whether it was a sign I shouldn’t be blogging any more. Then on Wednesday I bit the bullet and rang Bluehost and left it in the hands of a techy whizz. They confirmed it wasn’t anything I’d done and promised to sort it out. Lo and behold, less than 24 hours later all was fixed and so here I am. I’ve now decided to take it as a sign (I’m a strong believer that everything happens for a reason) that I am strong enough to sort out issues when they arise and that there’s nothing that cant be tackled if you seek the help of the right people.

Anyhoo, onto the post I intended to write on Monday…

When I was a little girl, I remember my Grandma saying ‘penny for your thoughts’ whenever any of us were daydreaming. Well, let me tell you, if I was given a penny for each of my thoughts I’d be a rich woman in a short space of time! I think about many different things and sometimes my thoughts just tumble around and around in my head like clothes in a tumble dryer. Crafting ideas and wanting to fit in so many things are the reasons behind a lot of my thoughts but to be honest, I probably spend more time mulling over things than I actually spend doing them. New ideas for crafting are always popping into my head and have lately come even more to the forefront. As a teacher, working 4 days a week and a young daughter, life is pretty hectic and I’m often too tired to spend the evenings doing the crafty things I had planned, resulting in me getting a wee bit (read a lot) grumpy about it! Whilst I do love teaching the younger children, the spark has gone out of it for me a little in recent years with the constant assessing and target setting that happens in education these days. Now, as it happens, my job is due to finish in about a year and a half when our school will close due to the military drawdown in Germany and myself and as a family we  would really like to stay living here in Germany. I could look at transferring into the German education system but the more I think about it the more I feel a pull towards my crafts and it just feels like a sign that I’m ready for a change.

About a year  ago I saw Dennis Quaid being interviewed on This Morning and he was talking about the advice he gave to his kids as they were growing up.I wrote it straight down and stuck it in my diary:

 

Recently it popped to the forefront of my head and I thought ‘yes, this is what I need to do!’

I have so many ideas about what possible direction this could take and when I spoke to my sister about having too many ideas and not being able to decide which ones to pursue, she suggested writing them all down, no matter how silly they may seem. So, last weekend I decided to start a folder/ scrapbook where I can pour out all my thoughts, in the hope that 1) it will free my brain up a little and 2) that within the next 18 months it will help me to build up a clear idea of the way forward. At the moment the folder is a just a plain dull grey but it will undoubtedly be jazzed up soon with the help of a little washi tape 🙂

Whilst losing my job is a scary prospect it feels like the perfect time for something new and I’m actually quite excited about where it could lead so watch this space…

Karen x

ps I’ll be back tomorrow with a less wordy post and  pictures of some finally finished wips! eek, exciting! For now, here’s a little sneak preview…