Réalta: Pinks and Purples

I'm not very good at Ebaying. I'm too timid for auctions (unlike my mother, whose arrival at charity auctions is met with a collective rubbing of hands. We have a shed full of motley furniture and a jumble of housewares brought back from her auctioneering. Sometimes she takes my sister Emily with her. Representatives of the local Lions Club and the St. Vincent de Paul throw their hats in the air when the pair of them saunter in, purse strings flapping and nostrils flaring at the scent of a bargain. Did I mention that Emily also has a shed crammed to bursting with a hodge podge of orphan items? Apparently the women in my family don't come with baggage, they have sheds.)

In any case, when I do win something, I usually surprise myself. I made a token bid on a kilo of grey wool and then, to my shock, won it (I must add that no one bid against me, just in case you had visions of me pounding the keyboard shouting, "It's mine! Mine!") In any case, I had to promptly get rid of it because it simply wouldn't do, having batch of idle skeins hanging around, bullying all the oddbods and scrappy balls of yarn that normally fill my basket. Goodness knows, a gang like that might even organise an uprising: we might wake up one morning and find ourselves knitted into our bed. Uh-huh. It could happen.

So I made another Réalta. Every time I make this afghan, I get annoyed with myself before I even start sewing it together: the colours look horrible together. Why on earth - no, how on earth did I make 42 octagons without noticing the fundamental ugliness of the colour combination? Then I sew it all up ... and realise that it's actually okay. Sometimes even quite nice. Magic, I tell you, it's magic!

Autumn Realta

This one was a bit of a hit-and-miss effort. I had planned to make it with these colours:

Very demure, eh? Unfortunately, three of the six colours were so similar, I couldn't tell them apart when I was crocheting in the evening under artificial light. After my fifth time clambering on to the coffee table  to hold my crochet up to the lightbulb, I decided to throw a few more colours into the mix.

The problem was, it still didn't look very nice:

But here speaketh the benefit of 30 years' crochet experience: you have to keep going. Uh-huh! Even if the 52 individual pieces don't look very nice, something weird and wonderful happens when you sew it all together. It becomes ... quite interesting. Rather nice. Sometimes even kind of pretty.

And, in an effort to turn over a new crafting leaf, I created and kept a project page.
Impressive, eh? Yup. Sometimes I even surprise myself:

 

 

(I would be more impressed with myself if I hadn't promptly lost it after completing the afghan, but I'm pretty sure it's on my desk somewhere.)

Booboos and Ooopsies

I had a fantastic idea: I'd use my Realta pattern crochet the motifs in sock yarn, to create a stained-glass window effect. I dug out all the tiny little balls of sock yarn that I had and, in the last few evenings just before going to bed, I made an octagon or two. Or seventeen. Plus a septagon ... by accident. Naturally, I didn't notice this before sewing them together. Don't ask me how. I might have noticed it sooner if it had been at the centre of the piece, but as luck would have it, it was at the edge and already firmly sewn into place when it occured to me that it looked a bit odd. Can you spot it?

Yes - kind of obvious now, isn't it? Anyway, as we all know, crochet is a very forgiving craft and a bit of creative sewing allowed me to line up the sides of the errant septagon and tease it into line with its eight-sided neighbour. (Evil chuckle).

And there we have it - a nice, bright cushion displaying my perfect craftswomanship (another evil chuckle.)

Baby Realta

I actually finished this last week but I just haven't had the chance to post it. This is the same pattern as the Realta afghan, but done in worsted weight yarn and in more demure colours. It's destined for my new niece as a ... um, what do you call them? Blankets that you plonk gently lay babies on so they can flail around wave their little limbs about? Let's just call it an extra thick blanket for the sofa or the floor.

Anyway, same pattern, different colour combination:

Finito!

I spent this morning edging the blanket, weaving in and snipping ends. Ugh.
But now it's finished and all that remained to be done was to take a few photos. Sadly today is so windy that the daffodils in my father's garden are bent double to the ground. So taking a decent photo was a challenge. Zuppy turned up to help and then scuttled off when it got too cold. If you look closely at the photo, you can see that he was watching me out of the corner of his beady eyes: as Iset up the photo I had to push him away with my leg while struggling to pin the darned blanket down in gale-force wind. He was determined to get up on the bench (and note that he's a vertically-challenged terrier so he tried to use his sharp little dog-claws to get a leg up) while I tried to shove him aside and keep the blanket from flying across Farmer JohnJoe's field next door (and they spread slurry yesterday so I was rather stressed.)

The pattern has just been tested and - all going well - it will be published at the end of March!

Miles of Tiles

Gingerbread Mammy phoned me on Sunday to give me a run-down on all the action in our town. This is often like the Births, Deaths and Marriages section of a major newspaper, except that there is often an indepth genealogical footnote to each entry ("Lisa Kenny had a baby by C-Section. That's Lisa Kenny from the Dry Cleaners, her mammy worked in the Winkle's newsagency at the weekend - remember the blondie-haired woman with the funny eye who used to sell the Cadbury's Creme Eggs after Easter Sunday mass? Her grandda had the greyhounds and we used to see him walking them down by the railway every morning on the way to school?" etc.
I have no idea who any of these people are.)
She also keeps me up to date on my father's antics - he has a new laptop. He had another laptop that was (helpless pause), well, it was pretty good and then there was a new laptop on the market that could (helpless pause) - do other things that the first one couldn't so they exchanged it for this new one which can do (helpless pause) other things. She thinks.
"But it's an Apple," she adds. "By the way, you haven't posted on your blog recently, missy."
"I know," I say. "But I've loads of photos of the blankets I've been working on, so I'm going to put them up later on."
Miffed pause.
"Ah, we're not very interested in crochet," she says. "We prefer the other kind of posts."
I suspect my parents are primarily interested in posts in which they play the starring role. And with this introduction, I hope I have kept them happy for tonight.

Now, on to the crochet.
This is what I'm up to now:

 
The pattern for this afghan - provisionally entitled the Tiles Afghan (because they look like ... well, tiles) - is being tested by half-a-dozen dynamic crocheters that I have locked up in a top-secret facility, guarded by FBI agents and a pack of vicious dogs. While they are checking the pattern for incidences of my (in)famous numerical fuzziness, I've been trying the pattern out in different ways. This is a baby blanket in cream and denim blue, which I call the Dutch Tiles Afghan - because the pattern looks like Delft tiles.

I Am Colour Starved

I like this pattern, I really do. It lets me do all kinds of weird and wonderful things with colours. This is the tester-blanket for a pattern I'll write up as soon as possible. I started off in another colour subset, but I need a model blanket for the pattern picture. So I decided to use ALL my colours (and we all know that I don't shy away from colour. Nom, nom.) I have enough blankets to cover almost every shabby chair and sofa in the Gingerbread House (= no mean feat, let me tell you) so this one is going to be a present ... maybe for my youngest niece, a toddler who seems to enjoy dancing around in little more than her mother's half-finished crochet blankets.