Freezing my buns off with my bestest bud.

I went to two Mets games last week, on Sunday and Tuesday. The first allowed me to reconnect with an old friend and some of his friends, and the second allowed me to introduce Satanski to America’s pastime. The Mets won the first game, which took place on a warm and sunny afternoon, and I had an insanely good time. The Mets lost the second game, which took place on a cold and windy evening, and I had an insanely good time.

Nice selfie, Nic

To show my Mets pride, I made myself a hat. I winged this one, and worked it top-down because apparently I didn’t have enough going on in my life that week. I duplicate-stitched the saddest ever Mets logo on the hat, but cut off all evidence of my attempt at branding off as soon as I got home, because it was just too tragic for words. There is photographic evidence of this, but I’ll have to think long and hard before releasing such an image into the ether of the Internet, where it may return to harm me when I least expect it. I haven’t given up on the logo, though. I’m shall attempt to embroider it the next time, and hopefully that will allow me to walk around wearing my hat with pride.

Now I just have to learn how to embroider.

Planned out the blanket. Discovered I was missing one square. Oops.

I learned to crochet pretty much entirely to knit the Babette blanket, which I find beautiful. I had the pattern in my Ravelry queue for years before I actually started it, and my first attempts at granny squares were enough to make the wee baby Jesus weep. I practiced with acrylic until I got to where I thought I needed to be. I thought that my first squares were pretty good, but once I’d finished the two spiral blankets and came back to the Babette, I realized how wrong I was. The squares that had looked great to me were uneven, the row changes were sloppy, and on the whole it didn’t look like anything I’d ever want anybody else to see. Thankfully, I had only done a few real squares, so I didn’t lose much time by going back and undoing those. I shudder to think of how bad my rejected practice squares must have been.

Piecing together one section

Once I was better at crochet, I got going in earnest, and made the approximately million and three  squares in this blanket (okay 126, but who’s counting)? In between, I did crocheted some hats and skulls (many many skulls), which I think further improved my stitches. Even when I went back to crochet the one square that I was somehow missing, I noticed the change in my stitches’ tension, as compared to my efforts back in October.

I’m now finished with all of the individual blocks in the blanket, but am having the worst time figuring out the final configuration, and how to achieve it. I’m not sure how this is going to pan out, because I haven’t really loved any of the available options for putting together this blanket. Whip stitch is ugly, mattress stitch seems like too much work for not a pretty enough payoff, single crochet looks a little ugly, and I’m reluctantly going with slip stitch, but I have yet to be bowled over by how it looks. Plus, because I’m joining blocks of different sizes, the standard wisdom regarding connecting horizontally and then vertically really doesn’t apply here.

Another problem is that I clearly need to block my squares (like, ALL of them), and I really don’t want to. This thing may be hibernating until Jesus comes back.

I really like the way that this Purl Bee Babette came out, and I may have to go back to Purl Soho and look at the blanket, which is usually on display in the shop.

I’ve made several things lately, none of which have appeared on this site. Why is that? Sheer laziness, obviously. Here are pictures:

I made my first cowl, which was for a Valentine’s Day exchange. It was so cute, and it matched a hat I’d already knit, so I kept it.

I attempted a second cowl, using the same pattern, more for giggles than anything else, since the color was not what my exchange partner wanted. I liked seeing how different the resulting cowl was, due to the bulkier yarn that I used.

The cowl I eventually did give her was something that I finished literally 10 minutes before I got to the exchange (due to the pesky buttons, which always give me trouble). I liked it, although I wished I’d had time to block it first. Since I started it at 11 pm the night before, that really wasn’t in the cards.