Mosaic Madness Preview

Gratuitous blocking shot. FO post coming right up!

Mosaic Update

I'm having trouble getting the colors to come out right, but you get the idea. Nothing like some bulky crochet for instant gratification!

Mosaic Madness

Victory at last! I have recovered the missing camera cable, but not without a lot of drama. I thought I had a solution that would allow me to circumvent the whole cable thing. Sophanne very gently pointed out to me what should have been obvious, which is that there is an SD card in the camera, and I should be able to transfer the images from the card to my computer with the use of a card reader. "Ah ha!" thought I. "I can do better than that! I have a built in card reader in my laptop!" And I eagerly popped the card out of the camera and attempted to fit it in the card reader on the laptop.

Alas, I was foiled. It seems the card in the camera is an XD card, and the slot in the computer is an SD card, and ne'er the twain shall meet.

"Not to worry," I thought. "I have a separate card reader. I know I do because I remember lending it to Older Son a few months back." Um. Yeah. Is anyone other than me surprised that it was not where it was supposed to be?

Not one to give up that easily, I thought, "Well, if the card doesn't fit the slot, perhaps I can find a cable that fits the camera." And I hied myself off to seek out every single flippin' mini- micro- midget- usb cable in the house. You know what I found out? They're all different, but not one of them fits my camera.

In the meantime, however, I found the missing card reader!

So I happily sat down and attempted to plug in the camera card. Guess what? It didn't fit.

At this point, I'm pretty sure I would have done something truly awful to the male members of the household (I had a whole slew of wonderful ideas), but just then, in waltzed the KH and tossed me the missing camera cable!

When asked, he eventually allowed it was "on the floor"--and that's all I could get out of him.

But I have my camera cable back, and so I have photo capability once more! Which means I can share with you my latest obsession, The Moorish Mosaic Afghan. This is not a pattern that would have caught my eye, except that I happened to see this version, and it was love at first sight.

I immediately downloaded the pattern and tossed the stash for yarn in the same colors. I have enough suitable yarn in four of the six colors I need, and of course, immediately ordered the other two colors from WEBS. They have not yet arrived, so you will notice a certain repetitiveness in the colors of my first mosaics:

And yes, if it had escaped your notice before, I am sure you now realize that I have crossed over to the dark side once again. This is crochet, not knitting. Or, as I like to think of it, a whole new craft to screw up. That one on the left? That is the third one I made. Somehow it took twice as long as the other two put together. It took three whole episodes of The Tudors to get through, because I think I ripped out a total of about 70 rounds to get this 14 round octagon. (By the way, The Tudors? Awesome. Definitely rated R, so no kids around while you're watching. If you're an Amazon Prime member, it's free to stream in HD!) Come to think of it, The Tudors may have had something to do with the ripping, now that I think about it.

The pattern calls for sport weight yarn (I think), and I am using worsted-ish weights, so my octagons are quite a bit bigger than the originals--about 12 inches across, pre-blocking. The pattern calls for 30 octagons, plus a bunch of squares and triangles that connect them. I suspect that will make a much bigger, heavier throw than I really want, so I may stop at 20 octagons. This will make for a somewhat different look in the end, but I think it will still work.

Now, if I could just get those yellow and orange yarns. I wonder if the mailman has come yet?

FO: Great Giant Granny Square Scrapghan Challenge of 2009

It's done!
(History here, here and here.)


The Details

Pattern: Purl Bee Granny Square Tutorial

Hook: size J (US)--because it's what I had on hand and it seemed to make about the right fabric with bulky yarn and worsted yarn doubled.


Yarns: A whole lot of different scraps, leftovers, and unallocated yarns from the stash, all bulky weight or doubled worsted weight.

Knit Picks Decadence (burgundy, brown); about 5 skeins each (1000 g total)
Knit Picks Andean Silk (olive--from traveling cables cardigan); about 4 skeins (200 g total)
Lion Brand Kool Wool (beige, dark green, red); about 9 sks beige/2 sks green/1 sk red (600 g)
Lion Brand Fishermen's Wool (brown--from Aran Cardigan); about 1/3 skein (75 g total)
Filatura Lanarota Puno (beige--from Mom's Christmas sweater 2007); about 4 sks (200 g)
WEBS wool tweed (banana); about 4 sks (400 g total)
Rowan Soft Tweed (green--from Tahoe); about 4 sks (200 g)
Debbie Bliss Luxury Donegal Tweed (green--from Mossy); about 4 sks (200 g)
Lana Grossa wool (green--from Knitting For Peace messenger bag); about 6 sks (300 g)
Araucania Atacama (green mix); about 8 sks (400 g)
Cascade Eco Wool (brown--from Not So Sahara); about 1/2 sk (100 g)
Elsebeth Lavold Classic Al (green--from Opulent Raglan); about 6 sks (300 g)
Malabrigo Worsted (dark green--from Central Park Hoodie); about 1 sk (100 g)
and
Cascade 220 Wool (burgundy); about 8 sks (800g)--just for the border!

If my recollections and my math are correct, this adds up to 4875 grams of yarn, or about 10.7 pounds! This is a biiiiiiiig blanket. I have a king-sized bed, and as you can see, the blanket drapes well over the sides. Although it's hard to get an accurate measurement of something so stretchy, it measures at least 108 inches--or nine feet--square.

Yes, it was an enormous amount of crocheting. It was also very heavy and unwieldy toward the end. The border took me a whole week to finish, and it's only six rounds of double crochet.

But it's soft and pretty and used up a whole lot of yarn I would never have used otherwise, so all in all, I call it a great success!

Now, where did I put my knitting needles?

GGGSSC* Update

*Great Giant Granny Square Scrapghan Challenge

I figure you're all waiting with baited breath to see how the Great Giant Granny Square Scrapghan Challenge of 2009 is shaping up. The 1984 Olympics ain't got nuthin' on me.

I didn't measure this when I laid it out, but it's in the four foot square range. It's at the point where I'm wondering whether two rounds a day is a reasonable goal. Each round takes a loooooooong time, and I do have other fiber projects, after all. The ever-changing colors keep it exciting, though. It's fun deciding what should come next and planning out how best to use those yarns I only have a little of.

I have determined that each linear foot of afghan takes about five yards of yarn (or ten yards if it's a worsted weight that I have to hold double). This is very useful information, since it allows me to calculate whether I have enough of a particular yarn to complete a round. Or it would, if I actually went to the trouble to measure out the yarn before I started a round. On the last round, I ran out of yarn about halfway around. As it happens, though, I had another yarn that was so close in color that I was able to complete the round without it being at all noticeable that I had changed yarns halfway through. One of the benefits of having a completely unreasonable stash, I guess. I got a little X-treme Needlework rush out of that victory.

Oh, and I must thank all of you who suggested weaving in the ends as I go. I stopped and did just that, and was immensely relieved when they were all gone. But my extra special thanks go out to Ruth and Crochetgurl, who both suggested crocheting in the ends as I go! Why the heck didn't I think of that?! It's simple, and much, much faster than weaving them in later. Now I have a nice, tidy afghan with no dangling ends.

The "Unmentionables" are coming along nicely, too. I have the body of the shorts completely done, grafted, ends woven in, and I'm working on the first leg ruffle. And despite Colin's comment--which made me laugh out loud, by the way--I still think they're cute! I was able to try them on once I bound off the waist, and they fit, which was a relief. I had to guess at the sizing, and ended up adding an inch to the length of the legs and another inch to the rise, both to accommodate my rather long frame. I think those were good choices. I do think they'll make great summer lounging pajamas with the addition of a camisole top. If I have enough yarn left, I may even knit one to match!

The Great Giant Granny Square Scrapghan Challenge of 2009

I seem to have developed a small obsession with the venerable crocheted granny square. You've seen this, of course, which now lives in my knitting spot and is also perfect for curling up on a lounge chair next to the pool after dinner. I love it. I enjoyed making it and I enjoy using it. After I finished it, I thought about doing a couple of rows on my nearly complete Swallowtail shawl, but discovered I would have to wind another skein of yarn and do a Russian join, so that sort of fell by the wayside. Instead I spent an evening making...yawn...a few inches of progress on the endless Chevron Scarf. All I can say about that is it's a good thing we don't actually need scarves in San Diego.

And then I started this. It is currently on hold, because as much as I love the color combo (and even though I have over 4000 yards of this bulky weight wool--don't ask, I blame WEBS), the turquoise, purple, hot pink, green mix doesn't go with anything in my house, or in the houses of any of my friends, family, neighbors, acquaintances...and despite the rather substantial evidence to the contrary, I am at heart a practical person and don't want to spend a fair amount of my limited life span crocheting a giant, beautiful afghan that will never see anything but the inside of a linen closet.

In a fit of Spring Fever, I then cast on for this year's utterly adorable, completely impractical, never-to-actually-be-worn Spring Folly. (I do this every year. April hits, and I just can't resist making something completely inappropriate to my age, shape, taste, and lifestyle. I have learned to accept it. And the women in my knitting group got a great laugh out of this one.)

This is the pattern "Unmentionables" by Lee Wood Juvan, from the Summer 2007 Knitty. Why? I have no idea. I really can't imagine a scenario that would find me wearing knitted bloomers with ribbon ties. I tell myself I can wear them as summer jammies--completely ignoring the fact that I don't wear jammies. But, oh, it's a fun pattern! The yarn is Jaegar Roma in Fern, which I had in the stash, purchased quite some time ago for $1.99 a ball from Smileys. I made my Gathered Pullover out of this yarn in white, and I love it, even though it's primarily synthetic. It's very soft and stretchy, holds its shape beautifully, and doesn't pill at all. It seemed like the perfect yarn for this pattern--even if it is destined to spend its life in a storage box under the bed.

But the lure of the granny square was irresistible, and I was consumed with the desire to make a giant granny square afghan for my king-sized bed. I wanted to use Noro again, because, well...do I really need to explain? But after several hours of searching the internet, I concluded that a good mother would not raid the kids' college fund to finance enough Noro to make a king-sized crocheted afghan, so I moved on to Plan B.

Plan B is one of those things that's great in theory. It justifies the purchase of all sorts of strange and wonderful yarns, not to mention bookcases and boxes and baskets and bags to store it all in. But Plan B rarely comes into play in the real world. Plan B is "Knitting From Stash," and it is largely a theoretical concept in my world. This time, though...this time Plan B is going live with a vengeance.

After a lengthy perusal of the stash, which involved impressive gymnastics in order to pull it out of all the corners and crevices and crannies into which is is crammed, I recognized that even I do not have enough of a single color--or even a single type of yarn--to crochet a king-sized afghan. I do, however, have an extraordinary number of leftover skeins and balls from previous projects. I live in fear of running out of yarn, and also labor under a delusion about my actual size, and so I almost always have 1 or 2 or 14 balls of yarn left when I finish a sweater. I knit a lot of sweaters. I also discovered that virtually my entire stash consists of shades of green, red, and brown. Coincidentally, my bedroom (and the rest of my house) is decorated largely in shades of green, red, and brown. (Hmmm...do you think there's any connection here to my red hair and green eyes?) And so, I made myself this challenge: to crochet a giant Giant Granny Square, at least seven feet square, using only leftover yarns from the stash.

Think about that for a minute. Seven feet square--the minimum size I figure I need to completely cover my bed--is 49 square feet. My Noro giant granny square is five feet square, which is 25 square feet. It took 1000 grams of bulky weight Noro Iro and an entire sweater's worth of worsted weight wool. That means this afghan will be twice the size of that throw and will require twice as much yarn. And that, my friends, is a lot of yarn. The fact that I am completely confident I will be able to pull this off tells you something about the amount of leftover yarn I have in the stash.

In fact, I have so much leftover yarn in the stash that I was able to pick and choose to come up with a combination of colors and weights that pleased me:

Yup. That's a two-bushel laundry basket full of yarn. And I forgot to pull the yarn I'm already using out of the large knitting bag I stuffed it into for the photo op, so there's more. And if I were to run low, there's plenty more where this came from.

Check out all the pretty colors:

Now, for the purposes of this challenge, I have defined "leftover yarn" a bit broadly. Much of this yarn is in fact left over from completed projects. Some of it is not technically leftover, but was purchased either with no project in mind or for a specific project that didn't work out. But in any case, all of this yarn has been in the stash for a long time (over a year, at least) and isn't earmarked for anything, nor is it likely to find its way into a sweater any time in the foreseeable future. This may be stretching the definition of "leftover" just a little, but it works for me.

And check this out:

That's about a two-foot square of Giant Granny Square Scrapghan! The colors are a little off. That light cream is actually yellow, and all of the colors are a tad richer in real life, but it's still pretty close. There are a whole lot of different yarns in there, including some gorgeous, super soft alpacas, along with some scratchier wools, and even some beige, wool-acrylic blend bulky that I bought in a particularly oblivious moment. There are leftovers from my CPH, the Knitting For Peace Messenger Bag, my Traveling Cables Cardigan, my Tahoe, my Opulent Raglan, and probably a few others as well.

I made a few rules for myself to keep this from looking too crazy. First, I'm using only shades of red, brown, green, and a little yellow. Second, all the yarns are either bulky weight or doubled worsted weight. Third, each round must be a single color. Fourth, every other round must be a shade of green (I have a lot of green yarn). Other than that, I'm just trying to space the yarns so that they look pretty and so that I don't run out of some colors early on and have none left when the afghan starts getting big. I'm trying to keep the whole thing looking like there was some sort of plan, without actually following a pattern of color repeats, which I think would get both boring and difficult, as I have different amounts of so many different yarns. So far, I'm pretty happy with it; I haven't been able to stop crocheting...around and around and around...

There's only one problem with using different yarns instead of a self-striping yarn:

But I'll think about that tomorrow.

Uh-Oh.

I think it may be time for an intervention of some sort.

FO: Giant Granny Square

It's done! I used the purl bee granny square tutorial to make this. I think you could easily make one of these even if you don't know how to crochet already. These pictures are of the afghan unblocked. It's currently soaking and will be blocked tomorrow. The finished size pre-blocking is about five feet square.

I used 10 skeins of Noro Iro plus a bag of unknown recycled brown wool I found in the stash for the border. I just crocheted until I ran out of the Noro, then switched to plain double crochet (I think) for the border and continued until I ran out of the brown yarn, which I held doubled. If you don't already know this, crochet really, really eats up yarn. I think I had a whole sweater's worth of the brown yarn.

I used a size J hook, because it seemed to be about right and I had one. Gauge is pretty irrelevant with an afghan, as long as you like the fabric. I can honestly say I loved making this, despite the problems I had and the massive amount of ripping I did to solve them. (After I got the whole thing done and the ends woven in last night, I discovered a mistake with a corner only inches from the beginning. It doesn't throw off the shape, though, and I'm not about to rip the whole thing again, so I am embracing the error as proof that it was made by human hands and not a machine.)

The tortoise came over to check it out during the FOto shoot. I think he likes it.

[Endangered California Desert Tortoise, which can't be re-released into the wild. I have a permit for him. My aunt rescued him from another owner more than 30 years ago, and he was already an adult then. I've had him for the past three years, since my aunt moved to Colorado, so we know he is approaching 40, at least, and may be much older. No one knows how long they live, but they are known to live at least as long as humans, and probably longer. I'm going to have to put him in my will.]

Comeuppance

Remember how, when you were in junior high, and one of the Mean Girls made fun of you, your mom would tell you, "Don't worry about it. What goes around comes around."? [At my junior high the Mean Girls were called the "socs"--short for "socials"--and their leader was a girl named Courtney Buffington (really!), who did her best to make my junior high school years a living hell. But I digress.] And even though it didn't help at all when your mom told you that, it turns out that it was true.

Two days ago I was snickering at the Yarn Harlot's tale of the elephant sock. I mean, how could you possibly not recognize that this thing was a disaster in the making? How could anyone be in such denial as to not realize that there was no way this was going to end up being a sock? If you haven't seen it yet, you seriously need to go check it out.

And then yesterday, I was giggling at Trek's failure to note that the neck shaping on her aran cardigan needed to happen simultaneously with the armhole shaping, especially since I had blogged about making the exact same error with the exact same pattern well before she made the mistake.

So I suppose I had it coming. What's wrong with this picture?

If you said, "Hmm, that lower left corner looks a little....odd," you are correct. It does look a little odd. A little Dali-esque, actually. [Not that I have anything against Dali and his melting clocks. I just don't really want to crochet one.] The thing is, it's been looking like this for a while now. And I kept thinking maybe there was something not quite right. It might have been the funny little wrinkle I kept getting at the corner when I tried to smooth it out. It might have been the way that my square didn't really look quite...square. It might have been the way that I seemed to be changing to a new round a little too often. But despite the nagging sensation that all was not well in crochet land, I kept going. Despite recognizing several times that it wasn't getting better with time, I kept going. Even last night, when I finally discovered what was causing this not-quite-squareness, I kept going.

This is what caused the problem:

See that bump on the corner? That bump is the start of a new round. Only one corner is supposed to have that bump, and when you reach it, you know you are starting a new round. If you look closely, though, you will notice that two of my corners have that bump:

That is a bad thing.

But not, I thought, bad enough to warrant ripping back 10 rounds. Doesn't sound like that much? Bear in mind that 10 rounds on a 42" square is more than it sounds like. Think "widest part of lace shawl" and you'll be in the ballpark.

So, as we've already established, I kept going. I fudged the bad corner. I figured, who's going to notice? I had not, at this point, laid the thing out to take a picture, so it wasn't until I did that this morning that I realized I had a much bigger problem and finally accepted there was no alternative to ripping.

So I did. I ripped and ripped and ripped. I ripped for a really, really long time. I ripped until the yarn ball I was winding was too big to hold in one hand and I had to brace it against my belly to hold it while I kept winding. Finally, I got to here:

That's it. That corner there is the culprit. And...

...ahhh. Now it's gone.

Now all I have to show for the past few days of marathon crochet is this:

That's about a 14" square.

Actually, that's not all I have to show for it. I also have this:

That, folks, is a 350 gram ball of bulky weight yarn. Three and a half skeins. Three days worth.

*sigh*

The Antidote to Lace Knitting

A few days ago I saw this and fell completely and hopelessly in lust. My palms started to sweat and my heartbeat sped up and I knew I wouldn't be able to rest until I cast on for a Giant Granny Square of my very own. I know it's crochet; I don't care. I don't have anything against crochet, except that it's not knitting. I learned how to crochet years before I learned to knit, if by "learned" you understand that I mean I figured out how to make something resembling a square piece of fabric out of a stringy, plastic-y substance that went by the name "yarn" back in the 1970's. Come to think of it, I believe the original granny square blankets were often made out of this same substance.

But I love the idea of a single, giant granny square crocheted from gorgeous, chunky Noro yarn. I almost immediately located this and deemed it perfect for the purpose:


See how well the colors work in my family room?

So I pulled up the instructions on my computer and cast on.

Within the first few moments, I discovered that I do not know how to crochet. Whatever the thing is that I learned to do all those many years ago, it was not at all what the instructions told me to do now. It took me an embarrassingly long time to get the hang of making a simple granny square. I stopped counting after the sixth time I ripped back to the beginning.

Eventually, though, I got it working, and was reminded how delightful instant gratification really is:

This is one skein of Noro Iro, and it's a little more than a foot square. I have nine more skeins, so this should end up being a decently-sized throw for the family room sofa. Or...um...maybe my bedroom.