flowerbed

Dear readers, I have a ton of finished objects to share with you! This one though - this one needs its own post. A little while back Marie at the Underground Crafter wrote a series of posts in honor of Hispanic Heritage Month, wherein she featured different designers and crafters around the world, all sharing Hispanic roots. I added a ton of new blogs to my RSS reader from that series, and added quite a few new ravelry friends as well! I love seeing what crafters in all parts of the world are making. One of my favorites was this post on Sara Palacios, a designer and crocheter from Argentina. (Sara's own site is here. I don't know any Spanish, but it's still fun to see what she's making.) Her wonder blanket caught my eye, and I clicked through to ravelry to see that this gorgeous blanket is assembled all without cutting the yarn (i.e. you crochet the colored flowers all separately, then join them with the stars - the white parts in my version - CONTINUOUSLY). I'm always looking for crochet projects that are portable and easy enough to remember that I can make pieces while teaching, and those flowers fit the bill. I started making flowers with my many colored scraps of Knit Picks Swish (a washable wool worsted that I really enjoy working with, btw) and throwing them into a bowl on my coffee table. I got so obsessed with it that I had enough flowers for a whole blanket in just a couple days.

The next weekend we flew to California for the wedding of a couple friends, and those long flights between Chicago and San Fransisco gave me more than enough time to work the white stars joining all these flowers together. And as a side note, Sara does clearly state that this is a fairly advanced level crochet pattern, and after working those joining stars I can see why. The techniques include a few things I'd never seen before, and I definitely had to pay attention to where I was going, and ended up tearing back to fix mistakes on quite a few occasions. It wasn't particularly frustrating since the pattern itself is so interesting.

In other news, going to the park to photograph finished blankets on a wind advisory day in Chicago may not have been my best idea. This is one of the few pictures I got of the blanket *not* being blown away. Sigh.

As for what I'm going to do with the blanket ... no idea! It's definitely a baby blanket and not an afghan (size and colors!) so I'll probably hang on to it for the time being until the right recipient makes him/herself known!