The crocheted blanket is underway and I’m making decent progress :)  On Monday, I got all 30 centers worked in medium to dark shades of red.  I’m keeping them on a doubled length of yarn strung through their centers so I won’t misplace any :)

Myria thought these looked like strange cookies :)

Yesterday, I began the second stage of the square and I will work all of the squares through this point before going on.

I think there are a couple of distinct advantages to doing the work this way.  For one thing, it’s much more likely that my gauge will be consistent from square to square.  It’s also easier (not to mention neater!) to tidy up the ends as I go along.  Generally the attachment end gets worked in (over, actually) as I go along and the yarn end at the finish gets woven in before I start on the next square.  That way, when I’m done - I’m done!  I think it would be extremely daunting to get the blanket completed - all squares made and sewn together - and still have (hmmm, let’s see…around 250!!) ends to take care of.

I won’t be able to go through 30 of these in a day though; I only got 6 done last night.  Perhaps I’ll manage to go a little better today! 

However, I’ve also been thinking about this post, Introducing Normality over at Fleegle’s Blog.  Lime & Violet’s Daily chum and Ev over at Strings ‘n Things called it to my attention at about the same time.  In fact Ev, clever girl, has already worked up a little sample just to test out the theory.

This bears some serious thinking about because it offers entire new possibilities!  Stitch patterns, turned through 90 degrees take on entirely different aspects and can appear like completely new things.  I’ve been wondering particularly about patterns that have a strong directional bias like Feather and Fan or Japanese Feathers. 

On the other hand, I found myself thinking about the chevrons a simple top-down shawl makes as 4 stitches are added on every right-side row.  That V tendency is very flattering to most body sizes and shapes.  With the Normality procedure, you’re going to get horizontal stripes - great for patterning, perhaps, but not nearly as kind to nearly as many figure types.

But this is something I definitely want to play with, oh yes indeedy :)

We’ve got another bright, intensely sunny day here.  Of course it snowed like hell over the weekend, but honestly, with the temperatures as they’ve been, I’d be surprised if there was anything left of it by the end of today.

After much looking around (and the excellent suggestions from the Chatters group) I have finally found a crochet pattern that works!

Not too bad, hunh?  This is Chris Simon’s Flower Burst Square.  No only is it an attractive design with a nicely thought out structure, it is capable of many appearance changes simply by changing the colors of selected rounds.  Even better, it’s a 12” square - so it will only take 30 of them to make a generously sized blanket.  Of course each square does take a while to complete…

The disadvantage, and it’s a very minor one, is this…

...ends to weave in! 

I think I’ll do a kind of production line on this.  You know, starting with one color, crochet 30 center rounds.  Then when those are done, grab the next color and do the next set of color rounds.  And then, finally, the last rounds.  If I weave in the ends as I go along, I don’t think it will be any big issue when the blanket is completed.  The colors in the picture are purely for illustrative purposes.  I wouldn’t use that shade of green for anything but experimentation…except possibly at gunpoint…

Oh yeah!

I gave the top-down hat a second look and decided it wasn’t that funny looking after all, so I finished the increases last night.  Now, it’s just straight on to the ribbing.  Yee-hah! 

Ahem….

Other projects will be updated later on.  Right now, I’m just so happy to be knitting again that a magic-loop hat makes me absolutely delirious!  I wish I were always this easy to please :)

Happy Monday!