Category: crochet

A detour into crochet

Posted on by shelly

Mixed Stitches:  a group project

I drafted this post months ago at this point, and somehow never got around to finishing it up and publishing.  I seem to have fallen into that pattern I have with blogs, where the initial enthusiasm trails off and it starts feeling more like “work”.  There are a lot of upcoming things I want to post about, though, so I thought I should just get this one out of my queue first!

This project started last year (2020) when my craft group at work was contacted with a request – a co-worker wanted to commission a lap blanket for a group member who was retiring in December.  To be honest, my first instinct was to say “no, that’s too big of a project”, but another one of the group organizers was very gung-ho and definitely helped me get excited about it.

We got some parameters from the commissioner, like size, colors, and personal details to add in, and went off to our LYS, Knit Locally, to do some yarn shopping!  The store owner, Peggy, is always very helpful; we’d gotten some yarn suggestions over email and told her about our color scheme (our work’s logo colors), so she’d pulled some options and had them ready for us to look over.  Since it was during the middle of the pandemic, it was very helpful to make it a quick stop.

We picked out three colors of Berroco Ultra Wool – Denim, Maritime, and Dove.  The heathered Denim color wasn’t even on our list to start with, but when we saw it, it definitely called to us and helped make the more basic blanket squares pop.  Once we’d chosen that one, we ended up switching our contrast color from a bright white to Dove, a pale blue-gray.

We had four group members contribute to making squares, and ended up with knit, crochet, and woven squares!  They are all approximately 6×6″.  The corners have the recipient’s initials and her years at our workplace, duplicate stitched onto stockinette squares!  Another group member did that and I was happy to hand off the detail work since I’m not very good at duplicate stitching.

I decided to crochet all my squares – here’s a sampling!  You can find almost all of them in my Ravelry projects; I was really inspired by a set of 35 squares designed in 2020 by Rachele Carmona.  I think I made about 16 squares out of the 48, and I also joined them all together (with a slip stitch seam) and did a crab stitch edging for more stability.

It was a fun project but also a pretty big endeavor!  I don’t normally make blankets bigger than baby-sized, and I’m not sure I will again for a while unless it’s another group project.  It was fun trying out different combos of colors and patterns, though, and to do some crochet for a change!