Woven Threads

I'm sharing my progress working through the Chain Reaction Afghan Project. It's been great fun so far to really expand my repertoire of crochet techniques. Each square in the blanket is designed by a different person using different techniques/skills, and is only 12x12", so I'm never bored.

Boy, this whole blogging every single day thing is going to get a whole lot harder when I don't have any more of these crocheted blanket squares...

At any rate, this square is called Woven Threads (for obvious reasons). The construction is exactly what you would expect: you crochet 12 strips, then weave them together into a single square and crochet around the border. The strips are kind of unexpectedly complicated to make. If you look closely at that picture (sorry to those seeing this in their RSS readers, I cannot for the life of me get that first picture to be a normal size - you'll have to click through to see it big) you'll see that there's quite a variation of stitches involved. Initially I was kind of annoyed that I had to pay so much attention to my work and the pattern in order to make each of these strips, but in the end I'm glad that they don't just look like straight up rectangles of all double or single crochet.

As for the weaving, that part was pretty straightforward, but stitching around for the border was quite awkward. I attached locking stitch markers at the ends of each strip, but they still slid all over the place and didn't stay sufficiently woven together. Were I to do this again I think I would use large safety pins and actually pin down the fabric of both strips at each end together for the length of each safety pin so they would be much more secure. I'm really happy with the finished square! It's definitely one of the heavier squares in the blanket, since it's basically double thick crochet fabric. It's got some nice squish to it.

Just a blanket-wide note about this project: I find it really interesting that there seems to be a wide range amongst the designers in terms of crochet fame/career. While there are a few really well known designers, and some designers who have a handful of designs out, it seems that some are just regular folks who've published just their one square in this blanket (so far as google tells me). So I'm always curious to click through to their individual ravelry profiles, search them online, etc - do a little light crochet e-stalking, if you will. ;) The designer of this square is April Garwood, who has a ravelry designer page with a few other patterns listed, including some SUPER cute kid stuff including - wait for it - T REX HAT AND MITTS. Those things are suuuuper adorable. They use crochet intarsia, which I've never tried but would love to try my hand at some time.