Something New and Different

On New Year's Eve I started a new project. (Yes, I still have other projects, but let's not discuss that now. Now we're discussing my new project.) Can you tell what it is?

It's the Babette Blanket from Interweave Crochet Spring 2006. I had seen this a while back, but since I barely crochet, I hadn't really thought about it very much. Then I realized that the pattern calls for fingering weight yarn. If you knit socks, you soon have tiny bits of leftover sock yarn, which happen to be fingering weight. So I sorted through my sock yarn leftovers and made piles: non superwash of any color, superwash warm colors, superwash cool colors, and superwash whites (which in this case meant whites, creams, pale beiges, and pale grays). Since I knew that if I didn't narrow the colors down some in this project, I'd obsess over every stripe, I grabbed the scraps of warm colors in superwash wool. This was yellows, oranges, reds, pinks, rasberries, magentas, browns, and burgundies.

The only rule I gave myself was to only use yellow in 10% of the squares. The pattern calls for 128 squares, so 12 or 13 of those can have a yellow stripe in them. The reason I'm doing this is because yellow can easily take over a project, but limited to 10%, I can scatter the blocks with yellow in them around to move the eye across the blanket.

I know I'll want my blanket bigger than what the pattern calls for, but I'm going to start with making the squares called for. Then I'll play with layout and figure out how many more I need to get the size I want, working with my yellow rule on the additional squares. This means that the majority of this project will be lots of little squares, but at the end, there will be a lot of sewing up. I realize I could sew as I go, but I want to make sure I have the squares where I want them and the easiest way to do that will be to wait until they're all made. On the other hand, I just gave myself a new portable project while I do the little squares!