Ripple

 

All those colors of yarn are wound and ready to go for my Neat Ripple blanket, and I've got to get it finished by Christmas, so I decided to work up a practice swatch.  Lucy has the best photo tutorials and really holds your hand through her pattern directions so I just followed along and did what she said to do and soon enough, I had a little ripple swatch!  I used some Cascade 220 leftovers because the Tosh DK is very close to the same size so I could decide what size hook to use and use my swatch to figure out how many to chain for the first row.  The directions for this pattern are just great and the pattern is easy to memorize.  It only uses US Double Crochect (conveniently, the only crochet stitch I know) so once you get going it's really easy.  Fortunately, I haven't forgotten how to do a double crochet stitch.  The actual blanket will be striped, but instead of making all the stripes the same size like the pattern, I'm going to stripe like Lucy is doing in her current ripple blanket (scroll down in this post, it's in the photo with the Country Living magazine and in other photos, farther down).  I think those stripes will look better in my darker, more manly colors.

Yesterday being Valentine's Day, Mickael brought me home roses!  Logan politely sniffed them and wagged.  (Good boy!)  Maximus decided to pull the petals off of them and chew them up.  He's such a wonderful little kitten.