Crochet Bowl Fest

The other day I saw a pattern for crocheted bowls on Jacquie's blog, BunnyMummy. It's a clever twist on the basic principles for crocheting anything in the round, like the base of a bag or hat and, if you will forgive the pun, I was well and truly hooked. By using a double strand of cotton yarn, as the circle becomes three dimensional, it holds its shape to be self-supporting enough to make a bowl to put your yarn or fruit in rather than being soft and flexible for a bag or a hat. The cotton yarn has less stretch and "give" in it than wool or acrylic and by using it double and on a small hook the crochet keeps beautifully tight with just the right amount of stiffness to hold itself up without the need for any additional support. You can find the pattern here.

By using every spare minute I've had this week, I've made two of these so far and I love them! Mine are slightly bigger than Jacquie's (I just worked a few more increase rows before working up the sides without any increases) but I have used her principle of changing the colours one strand at a time so that they blend nicely into one another. The stitch is just straightforward single crochet (US terms) / double crochet (UK terms) and the pattern is easy to follow and to adapt.

It's a bit stiff working with a double strand of DK weight yarn on a 4mm hook but you kind of get used to it and it helps if you put your hook in at an angle like I am doing here in the pic above.

This is my first effort in a symphony of blues. As you can see, if you look carefully, with some of the stitches I've missed going into both loops, giving little lines here and there. On my second attempt, the sunset / sunrise coloured bowl, I managed to avoid this. I think it's one of the hazards of working with a double strand so one just needs to be careful to go into the whole of each stitch as you work it. With the mottled overall effect I don't think it shows too much though.

The yarn I've used is Cascade Ultra Pima which comes in the most fantastic range of jewel shades. It has a slight sheen to it and is a dream to work with - no splittiness or awkwardness to it at all unlike some cotton yarn which can get quite raggedy on the hook. The only drawbacks are that it's not particularly cheap (for which, read, "not at all cheap") and it comes in those wickedly beautiful skeins that require Winding Before Use. I had quite a bit left over from my Japanese Flower scarf which, fortunately for this project, was therefore already purchased and wound!

When I was new to crochet I tried to use one of these skeins without winding and the cat's cradle that resulted in seconds was unbelievable to behold. If it hadn't been so expensive I'd have been tempted to bin the whole mess, but as it had been rather expensive, many hours and a lot of cursing and huffing and puffing followed, while I unravelled, painfully and slowly, what had only taken the blink of an eye to change from a smooth skein, lying innocently flat and serene on the table, to impenetrably tangled spaghetti with malign intent. So be warned, if you are a novice with skeins, and do not be tempted to take a shortcut with them - they do not like it and nor will you!

Not possessed of one of those handy "winders and swifts" or whatever they are called, I find the best method is to use two upright chairs, placed back to back and slightly apart and to place the carefully opened up skein in a loop round both backs. You can then find one loosened end and begin to wind the yarn into a ball. It's tiring on the back as I find I have to stand leaning over the chairs in order to keep the yarn flowing smoothly and not pulling away more than it should, but it's worth it with this stuff.

I am now on a third bowl experimenting with more clearly defined stripes which I want for something on Sunday so I've got to get a move on! Hope no one's expecting any supper this evening!

Happy Friday evening everyone!

Moss-Stitch Crochet and Motley Mugs

OK, we all knew the temptation would be too great! After tippy-toeing around with the apple cosy and then the spud cosies, it was only a question of time until Mrs T was onto the mug cosies! They knew their time was coming and they waited smugly in the wings while I got round to them!

I held off, until my trip to the Knitting and Stitching Show in Harrogate last week kind of broke the log jam. There, beautifully displayed, on white painted shelves, were some of these glowing away in bright colours and calling out to me to pay out £8 for one (ouch! I think not!) or get crocheting! (I think, yes!) Marry that and Sue's enticing post on moss-stitch crochet here on her blog The 8th Gem and my mug cosy project was a-rolling!

I retain my reservations about the practicality of these - they will need to be washed, as far as I can see, every single time they are used, so with this in mind I've used easy-going and hard-wearing acrylic yarn in whatever colours I had left over from previous projects. Mostly vivid tropical brights from my African Flower bag. Not totally Christmassy, I grant you, but very warm and cheerful for winter.

Most of my mugs are mix and match, blue and white china but like everyone, I suspect, I have a motley selection of odd-bod mugs at the back of my cupboard which don't blend in very well with the others for one reason or another.

I use them to dish out tea / coffee in to workmen because I reckon they don't matter so much if they get broken, if accidentally knocked over, while the insides of the washing machine are under investigation or whatever, but they have now risen in the ranks to become a little family of Christmas mugs in woolly cosies.

They are so cheerful, I love them to bits even though they are so foolish and impractical! Who could not be cheered on a cold, wet November evening by a drink from one of these? They were also cheap as chips to make - no mug purchase necessary, oddments of cheap acrylic yarn probably amounting to 50p's worth if that in total and a few buttons from my button tin! And such fun to make using Sue's moss-stitch pattern. You can find Sue's gorgeous pics and the link to her pattern in her post here.

If you want to have a go yourself the only thing you really need to remember is that you need to make the cosy to fit the specific shape of mug you want it to go on. There is a surprising variety in mug dimensions and the cosy needs to hug the mug quite tightly to avoid slopping around when in use. Also a straight-sided mug is easiest to work with. One of my odd-bod mugs is more like a flower-pot in shape and slopes steeply out towards the rim. As those of you who are better geometers than I am, will immediately realise, the shape of something to go round a flower-pot shape needs to incorporate a parallax(?) curve as well as simply getting bigger at the sides. Guess who did not realise this when she started?! I sort of hodged it when I discovered it wasn't going to fit properly, by adding some taller stitches in the central section of the final rows to compensate for the lack of curve but it isn't quite right, I fear.

Straight-sided mugs are much easier to cope with. I chained 50 stitches on a 5mm hook before switching to a 4mm one for the rows and that worked well with my tension for a three inch diameter mug but if you want to give this a whirl, keep your mug close to hand and keep checking for fit with your own tension and preferred hook size. The type of yarn you use will also make a difference. I used DK weight yarn but anything will work - just adjust your hook size and length of chain appropriately. The cosies need to be high enough for you to make the button fastening over the top of the handle but again you will need to check the height of the mug you are using to see where this comes.

You can make the fastenings for mug cosies in various ways. I simply chained little loops of 8 chain stitches at the top and bottom edge of one side and sewed on a couple of matching buttons on the opposite sides but you can make a tab that comes over and fastens the cosy inside the mug handle or stitch the bottom edge together and just have a button at the top.

I like the double button option because it will make the cosies easy to wash and dry which, as previously indicated, is going to need to be a regular feature of their lives!

The moss-stitch pattern was new to me but really simple to work. I love the multi-coloured tweedy effect achieved by using a different colour in each row and the sort of stained glass one resulting from using double rows of a background colour interspersed with single rows of contrasting colours.

The bright colours work very well, I think,  but the pattern would also work beautifully in more subtle muted colours as well - gentle heathers, misty browns and soft greens.

I must see if there are any more odd-bod mugs tucked at the back of a shelf in need of cosying!

Hope you have had a good 

(and, in view of all the flooding here in the UK at the moment, dry) 

weekend!

Christmas Lap Quilts

I have to begin this post with a bit of a disclaimer! I am not a quilter. Not a proper one. I do patchwork from time to time, mostly using the old English paper-piecing method which requires zillions of paper shapes and even more zillions of tiny hand-stitches but you don't need to cut the fabric accurately  - it's just folded over the edges of the paper template and tacked in place before you begin assembly. This is fine as far as it goes and for a cushion or something small, I enjoy it - the handstitching is rather therapeutic - but for anything much bigger, it's enormously time-consuming.

For part of my Christmas-present-making I wanted to have a go at making a lap quilt. I got the idea from here. Purl Bee's version is beautifully simple even to the extent of the instructions suggesting that one could be run up as a present for a housewarming party the same afternoon! Well, I didn't need to produce anything that quickly, but time is of the essence at this stage of the game and something throw-sized rather than bed-sized seemed manageable, both in terms of time and the amount of fabric required.
And I think lap quilts make nice Christmas presents - useful (not in the spud cosy category!) but also fun and Christmassy and can be enjoyed by all ages of man or woman (or beast!).

As I said in my previous post on Christmas Hooky and Stitchy Preparations, I have amassed a number of Christmassy fabric scraps over the years - you know the kind of thing, a fat quarter here and a fat quarter there for hatting up jars of mincemeat to give away or to sell at the school Christmas bazaar  or for some Christmassy project or other. When I dug it all out, there was quite a pile although not enough to use on its own so I raided the rest of my stash and found some leftover, plainer bits and pieces that I thought could be paired up with the more flamboyant Christmassy numbers. I bought some cheap and cheerful, plain red and green cotton fabric to line them but, apart from some extra thread, I didn't need to buy anything else to make these; even the wadding was pieced together from leftovers from other projects. Patchwork inside patchwork, but you can't tell from the outside.

As far as the design went, I wanted something simple - I know my limitations(!) - but something more snazzy than just squares, stitched together. A lucky stumble on the so-called "Disappearing Nine Patch" design on the good old Internet looked perfect! Perfect, because it seemed to max out on effect while keeping the method pretty uncomplicated. You stitch nine squares together and then cut the stitched panel in half, crossways and vertically, rotate each quarter 90 degrees and stitch back together in a design that looks as though you spent hours and hours, piecing and stitching tiny panels together, only you didn't!

The only snag about the design was that there was no way I was going to paper-piece this little lot - a lap quilt may be small but it's quite big enough, if every join is going to be hand-stitched. It would have to be machine-stitched and would require exactly-sized squares. No room for Mrs T's guesstimated scissoring!

 So I went off piste with my barely used (and lethal) rotary cutter, a cutting mat and a ruler and did my best to cut to measure. I had to enlist D's help on this as he's a whizz with cutting stuff with very sharp knives and I tend to get a bit impatient and slap-happy which is not good with a rotary cutter! You can cut yourself on those things just by looking at them, I swear!

So a tottering pile of fabric squares later and with the sewing machine cranked up for action any spare time of the day or night, I made these:

I'm rather pleased with them. The pic quality is rather poor I am afraid - I found it extremely difficult to get pics which showed the whole quilt. It's probably just as well the graininess means you can't zoom in on any of them - the stitching is far from perfect. But unless you are going over them with a fine tooth-comb they look OK, I think. And they are meant to be used, not hung on a wall or anything.

Wasn't going to add the borders - too lazy - but they need them. The border seems to pull the design and the fabrics together. I am sure any proper quilter will tell you, "all quilts need a border "- I notice it seems to be an integral part of most quilt design but as I said at the beginning, I am not a proper quilter! I had some difficulty with mitre-ing the corners but again, unless you look especially closely, I don't think it's too noticeable.

And although I say they are "quilts", technically I am not sure that they are, as they are not actually quilted. They have wadding and a lining but I haven't stitched the layers through, on the top. This is for two reasons. I don't have a quilting or walking foot for my sewing machine and I got nervous about messing up what I'd already made and thought I'd quit (rather than quilt, sorry!) while still (sort of) ahead. The Purl Bee duvet design uses bar tacks at intervals to link the layers. I wondered about having a go at these, using the end part of the buttonhole stitch on my sewing machine, but the prospect of mangling all my hard work, if it went wrong, and it might have done - the buttonhole setting on my machine is cranky to say the least of it - held me back and the quilts are small enough, I think, to get away with it. I hope so anyway! What do you think? If anyone has any foolproof suggestions,  please let me have them! Otherwise they are going out of the door as is and I'm not going to worry too much about it.

I imagine them being used in the aftermath as well as the preamble of Christmas when the immediate rush and bustle has eased a little. What man, woman or child does not like, in those precious holiday days, to snuggle on the sofa under a layer of soft, bright patchwork in front of an open fire, worn out by all the excitement, with a good book or perhaps a film to watch or may be curled up with some hooky, sewing or knitting, or all of the above with may be a cosy cat, ensconced on top of said soft, bright patchwork, for extra warmth?

I don't have a cat or a dog - too many pet-allergies by other members of the household - but it's at times like these that I long for a large and friendly cat whose idea of comfort is the same as mine and with whom I could spend drowsy, contented evenings, under a quilt like this!

Of course it's quite possible that I am a bit starry-eyed about my own efforts and the reality may be, they get used at the bottom of the dog's basket or to pad a piece of furniture being transported in somebody's car but I shan't know and therefore I don't care!

Now where's my dream cat gone? And my cosy mug of hot chocolate with a fluffy marshmallow or two floating in it?! 

And a good supply of those little chocolate snowballs in candy shells, rolling in powdery, icing sugar, without which Christmas is just not Christmas! H and I are addicted to these and I have to hide them if I want any for myself - don't tell him, but there's a secret stash already squirrelled somewhere marked for Mrs T's private consumption! Never mind my last Rolo, would I give away my last one of these?

... I might, but then again, I might not!

Edelweiss Skirt

Some of you may remember my Deconstructive / Reconstructive sewing project where I recently went into uncharted (for Mrs T) sewing waters to design, from scratch, a replacement for a much-loved, but frayed, M&S denim skirt, courtesy of the magic instructions in "Sew What! Skirts". This little project had some denim fabric left over - probably because Mrs T's initial arithmetical calculation of the fabric required was a bit out - but hey, let's not carp if overestimating leads to another happy project such as this! Enter my Edelweiss skirt!

It's another denim skirt, but a short one - not enough fabric for another long one. I had to redesign my original pattern from a classic A-line to a straighter shape with less flaring for the short version as otherwise it would have stuck out too much at the sides. I know this, because my first attempt did stick out too much at the sides and had to be re-sewed to streamline it. This was another slightly unnerving foray into the unknown, as I had no idea whether simply taking the seam in, would do much good if the overall shape was out of kilter, but remembering my teenage days, when we all borrowed our mothers' sewing machines on the quiet and re-sewed the leg seams in our jeans to make them tighter-fitting, with never a qualm,  (anyone else remember doing this?) I took the risk. And it worked - the superfluous width in the sideseams, that had stuck out rather alarmingly when I tried it on, had disappeared and in its place emerged a new and streamlined, rather well-fitting shape. Probably more by accident than design, but never mind, who's telling?!

In the last couple of weeks or so I've been devoting every spare minute to Christmas present-making but this last weekend, with an unexpectedly free Saturday afternoon, in a sudden selfish urge, I threw off the present-making to make this for me. Sorry, but I did. And the good news is that it didn't take long - no more than a twinkle of an eye, in real terms.

I am so enjoying making garments that really fit me. Everyone has different quirks to their shape and commercial patterns, although they mostly allow you to shorten or lengthen them, don't offer the flexibility of drawing out something from your own measurements. It's been very encouraging too to discover that if it isn't quite right to begin with, it's possible to tweak it, until it is. Hitherto I've always felt that if a pattern hasn't ended up fitting very well, either it's my amateur sewing skills that are not quite up to the mark or it's simply not a good pattern for my shape and in either scenario there's not much I can do. But no longer!

It's also the case that wonderful though commercial patterns are and I have a whole stack of them, covering everything from babies' sunbonnets to adults summer dresses, toddler dungarees to skirts I've made for myself over the years, as well as pyjamas in a range of sizes to fit small boys and now big ones, they are quite expensive to buy individually. Being able to draw one's own pattern from scratch is going to save quite a lot of money. I don't feel confident enough to draw out anything too complicated (yet!) but you never know where it will end!

Making your own clothes is not always a frugal option - you can spend a fortune on beautiful fabric and handmade buttons, trimmings etc - and sometimes saving money isn't the point of the exercise but to be able to conjure up a new garment for next to nothing has a delight all its own. This was made entirely from what I had in the cupboard apart from the 20 cm zip for which I did have to splash out the princely sum of £1.90 - the fabric was leftover from the previous skirt (and even if I'd had to buy it I would barely have needed three quarters of a metre so we are talking Seriously Frugal Clothing here!), the bias binding (used to bind the facing and the false hem) was made out of a long term resident fat quarter from my fabric stash, the thread was a colour already in stock in my wooden, Belgian chocolate / reels of thread box and the finishing touch, the Edelweiss braid, I had bought a length of in Cologne.

And although I had given half the braid away, there was just enough left to make a wonderful Alpine-flowered border for this little number and two useful little loops to hang the skirt from. Perfect!

I feel I am too old now, in my late forties, to wear skirts that are too short but I do find plain, straight skirts above the knee comfortable and practical and they are perfect for pairing with thick, woolly tights and cosy cardigans in the colder months of the year. Which means most of the year in this country. While in Germany, I bought several pairs of wonderfully-patterned, thick, "Strumpfhose"- some stripy ones and some, I have to admit it, slightly startling ones, patterned with snowflakes and squirrels(!) There are not many days, in my book, that cannot be cheered by a pair of loudly colourful and patterned, thick, woolly tights. I know, I know, call me shallow if you will!! I am unrepentant! If you do not have such an article of clothing in your wardrobe I recommend investing in a pair pronto, to fend off the winter blues both literally and metaphorically.  They are a wonderful way of giving a whole new lift to existing clothing without spending too much or having to invest in a whole new outfit. Although to put the cost thing in perspective, the tights will cost you more to buy than this skirt would cost you to make, even from scratch!

Anyway as you can see, my new Edelweiss skirt pairs quite nicely, I think, with these jolly German stripes and "all is cosy, all is bright," to paraphrase the immortal words of "Silent Night"! Now I must get back on track with what I am supposed to be sewing and hooking in my free time! An update on some of that to come. My sewing machine has never worked so hard! You can see some of its output hanging up on the right of the pic but we had so much trouble getting a pic that was remotely decent (Mrs T is not at all photogenic) I didn't like to make the long-suffering photographer go round again to eliminate extraneous background!

Although having said that I need to get back to what was on my "to sew / to hook" list, the fact that this skirt needed so little fabric and was so quick and cheap to make, is singing a whispering siren song in my head that there may be other leftovers just waiting in the wings to rise like similar phoenixes from the ashes!

If you fancy a similar skirt yourself, have a go! It really was so easy - just draw out the top of the skirt as for a normal A-line one (as per the Sew What!) instructions and then instead of drawing a straight line flaring out from the top at each side all the way from waist to hem, take the flare only as far as the widest point of your hips and then draw a gentler line at less of an angle from your hip point to your desired length. Couldn't be simpler. And if, like me, you find the sides stick out a bit to begin with, just re-sew until you've got it how you like it.

Conventionally, short straight skirts tend to have their zips at the back so this is what I did with mine, simply making the back of the skirt in two panels instead of one with extra fabric allowed for the seam allowance in the centre back into which I inserted the zip instead of at the side.

Babes In The Wood Crochet

As a small child I was addicted to fairy stories - I read all I could get my hands on and when new ones were scarce, I reread the old ones, time and time again. I had several, well-thumbed compendia of fairy stories, or "treasuries" as their old-fashioned titles described them. This is the frontispiece from my favourite one, which I still have on my bookshelf:

And I still remember the delicious frisson of joy I felt on discovering in the local, public library Andrew Lang's apparently unending series of colour-coded collections of fairy stories. Fairy tales from all over the world collected in The Orange, Red, Pink, Lilac, Blue, Crimson, Olive, Violet, Green, Brown, Yellow and Grey Fairy Story Books. Anyone else remember these? Originally published in the early 1900s, they were still populating bookshop and library shelves in the early 1970s. I think they have been given a new lease of life recently and are now again available for a new generation of fairy tale lovers.

Although all fairy stories were grist to my mill, some were better than others and some of course were a bit disappointing as far as the plot went. Not all were as powerful as "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs", "Sleeping Beauty", "The Princess and the Frog" or "The Brave Little Tailor Who Killed Seven With One Blow", "The Wild Swans" or "Rapunzel" (How I longed to have hair as long as Rapunzel's! Even on one occasion going so far as to construct DIY Rapunzel braids out of long lengths of brown wool, plaited together and pinned to my short curly hair with hair grips!).

Snow White was a particular favourite - I was mesmerised, not so much by the seven dwarves, at that stage unreconstructed by Disney, but by the whole business with the talking mirror and the Poisoned Apple and Snow White lying in her glass coffin.

This had an unfortunate repercussion, when at the time aged four, I was taken by my mother to have tea with a rather old-fashioned and stiffly unbending friend of my grandmother's. I was under strict instructions To Behave, to Be Polite and Not Rush About. All went well until tea was served by this rather severe old lady, when, with Snow White's perils running in my head, I was given something to eat and I asked, in the clear and bell-like tones peculiar to a four-year old with a burning question requiring an urgent answer, "Is this Poisoned?!" Needless to say, my mother was mortified with embarrassment and had a hard time explaining away my inquiry. To me, aged four, in a world partly inhabited by real people and partly (and equally vividly) by fairies, giants, wicked witches and the like, who, at the drop of a hat and without a scruple, substituted poisoned apples for harmless ones, it seemed a perfectly reasonable question. I had some difficulty convincing my mother of this point of view at the time however!

Anyway, I am wandering away from the matter in hand, or rather on hook! One of the stories with the least satisfactory plot, I always felt, was The Babes In The Wood. Even as a small child, I found it unsatisfactory, especially the ending, where a too-convenient-to-be-credible grandmother was on hand to encounter the robin wearing the scrap of the little girl's hair-ribbon and one of the buttons from the little boy's coat that the grandmother remembered sewing on herself! Even aged four this seemed to me to be stretching credibility too far even though I had no problem with witches living in gingerbread houses and wicked fairies casting mean spells at babies' christenings! Clearly my logic, at the age of four or five, was deployed somewhat erratically! But despite what seemed unsatisfactory to me about the plot, (not least the fact that, once the children were found, the story simply ended with them being taken to their grandmother's cottage, with no proper pursual of the miscreant robbers), the idea of the children falling asleep and being covered with fallen leaves by the birds, to keep them warm, enchanted me.

How cosy to be covered by a light eiderdown of soft autumn leaves! In my mind's eye, of course, these leaves were not damp and rotting nor did they realistically harbour woodlice, spiders and other creepy-crawlies! They were dry, as light and soft as a feather and all the colours of a New England Fall. When I first slept under a duvet as a student, rather than under the old-fashioned sheets and blankets we had at home, it was this image that floated in my head.

What has all this, you will say, to do with crochet? Well, the image of being able to snuggle under a drift of autumn leaves has stayed with me all these years and while doing a bit of stash reviewing in September, I came upon the beautiful Sublime yarn I bought in the Spring when planning and making my "Glory be to God for dappled things" cushion cover. I needed earth colours and neutrals for this cushion, which are not my usual palette at all and, to be honest, I over-bought as I wasn't sure what I would need. Some of what was left I used up in the dahlia cushion for my mother's birthday but there were still quite a few colours untouched.

Watching the autumn leaves beginning to float to the ground...

... I realised that here was a beautifully straightforward opportunity to make my childhood image a reality. All the colours of yarn I had left over were straight out of the illustration of the leafy eiderdown in my old fairy tale book - rich deep brown and umber, burnished bronze and soft ochre, golden amber, wine-red and flaming-orange, old yellow and a soft evergreen, bleached ivory and old parchment. They echoed all the colours of horse-chestnut, ash and oak leaves, birch and maple, cherry and beech, sycamore, lime, elm and willow with a few delicate leaf skeletons, pale as bone among them. I chose a simple granny square pattern  and started crocheting my own pile of soft autumn leaves.

Most granny squares are quite "holey", if you know what I mean. I didn't want the "holey" effect for my leaves but more solid blocks of colour. After one or two "holey" experiments, I settled for an adaptation of the pattern that was on the ball band of some Peaches and Creme yarn, that Liz of Carolina Knits very kindly sent me from North Carolina and I am very pleased with the result - nice, solid blocks of colour with minimal "holes" and very easy to crochet neatly together. I prefer to do this after finishing the blocks rather than joining-as-I-go because I like to play around with the design combination when I can see all the colours that are in play and how they are going to repeat against one another.

My pile of simple, blocky granny squares grew steadily during September and is now a "Babes In The Wood" throw just big enough to snuggle under on a late-autumn evening when it is dark and chilly outside. It's not quite as big as I would have liked - more a lap-quilt than a full-size throw in size but I didn't have enormous quantities of each colour and I didn't want to buy any more as the whole point was to use up what I had. But I think there is room in the world for small and cosy as well as for big and enveloping. The kind of throw that as well as using inside on a chilly autumn evening one might take outside for a late picnic when it's really too cold just to sit, but the sun is out and still warm and the idea of sipping a mug of homemade soup among the autumn leaves appeals.

I've given it an accentuated picot edge adapted from Lucy of Attic 24's Granny Stripe edging (you can find her original edging pattern here.) I wanted an edging that resembled the delicately complicated edges of sycamore or maple leaves and I think it's worked OK. I have deliberately not blocked the finished crochet as I want the overall slightly crinkly effect of the fallen leaves it represents. It's deliciously warm and snuggly even though it's quite small and of course small means easy to wash and not so expensive or so long to make as a bigger blanket so I may pass this way again! 

Not with my slowly deepening sea-ripple however, which, (for good or ill!), will be much bigger when it's finished. That, however is having to wait in the wings a little while my Christmas present-making takes priority. 

There are, of course, loads of granny square instructions out there and you may well already have your own favourite but if you want to replicate my solid blocks of colour here's my adaptation of the Peaches and Creme pattern: (I've given the pattern here in UK terms. If you use US terms, just substitute double crochets for trebles.)

Chain 5 and join with a slip stitch to form a ring.

Round 1: ch 3 (counts as first treble of first cluster of four trebles), now, working into the ring, make 3 treble crochets, 2 chains, 4 trebles, 2 chains, 4 trebles, 2 chains, 4 trebles 2 chains. Join with a slip stitch to the top of the ch 3 you made at the beginning.

In round one you will have 4 stitches on each side of your square, separated by the chain spaces.

Round 2: ch 3 (as before, this makes the first treble of the first cluster of four trebles), make 3 trebles and now into the chain space make 2 trebles, 2 ch and another 2 trebles. Now carry on your trebles in each st until you reach the next chain space. Make sure you do not skip the first st after the chain space trebles - you need to continue the round starting in the very first st, which can get a little hidden by the second pair of chain space trebles. When you reach the next chain space, repeat what you did in the first one i.e. 2 tr, 2 ch, 2 tr before continuing your trebles on the next side. When you get to the end of the round, join with a slip stitch to the first ch 3.

In round two you will have 8 stitches on each side separated by the chain spaces.

Round 3: exactly as round 2 except that at the end you will have 12 stitches on each side separated by the chain spaces.

Round 4: exactly as round 2 except that at the end you will have 16 stitches on each side separated by the chain spaces.

Round 5: exactly as round 2 except that at the end you will have 20 stitches on each side separated by the chain spaces.

I made my granny squares five rounds each but of course you could make them bigger or smaller. Each round you add, will increase the stitches in each side between the chain spaces by a factor of four.

Now what other fairy tales might prove inspirational for a blanket? Sleeping Beauty with a thick hedge of dark green thorns and deep magenta and wine-coloured roses surrounding a pale pink and white and gold sleeping princess? Cinderella with drab, ashy colours on the outside leading the eye to dancing colours of ballroom silks and satins and at the centre a bright orange pumpkin patch? The possibilities are myriad and may keep me and my hook "happy ever after", as in all the best stories!

In the meantime, The Babes in the Wood have it!