Bitten by the Crochet bug

I never quite thought it would happen, but yes I have been bitten by the crochet bug! It's not that I haven't crocheted before because I have, but it never really amounted to very much. The skills didn't increase, the will didn't come and it was just set to one side as a lot of things are as you go through life (lets not even deal with the painting here as it takes up too much space).

As a child I could crochet the basic stitches (in UK terms) chain, double crochet, half treble crochet, treble crochet and so on, and although I loved the rhythm of the stitches as they were created I didn't feel able to create an actual item from them.

I'm not quite sure what happened recently, but it must be a mixture of looking for a simple project, needing to use up lots of stash before a house move and a couple of babies arriving on the scene. I sat down one weekend and started looking at crochet blankets!

If you're looking for crochet inspiration then look no further than Lucy at Attic24 who has fantastic tutorials, beautiful pictures and is so inspiring. I spotted her Granny Stripe blanket and knew I'd hit the spot! I had a quick look at the instructions, had a play around and realised quite quickly that I needed a bit of a refresher. After searching t'internet I found maybematilda.
Her crochet tutorials are great; simple, clear and perfect for me to follow. In fact I loved the blog altogether. With an hour or so of practice I was off and running and able to go back to Lucy's pattern and start, wee hee!

These are the first two. Cute and such good fun. Perfect pram sized, chuck on the floor snuggly baby sized blankets. I'm itching to hand them over but I'm ahead of the babies being born, so need to wait. Hmm, yes, wait? Now that's an interesting concept. No, what I normally do is just start another one! In my defence there are many reasons why:

I'm trying very hard to get my house ready to put on the market, this is a) Very hard work physically b) quite hard emotionally for lots of reasons and c) quite therapeutic. A strange mixture, but whatever way you shake it, it's tough and I need distraction in the evening when I'm too tired to do any more. Add to that the enormous amounts of coloured dk yarn that keeps emerging from my house whenever I start digging and you can start to see why I started the 'big one'. It's a stash buster 'honest guv'.......

There is a plan. I will need to have a double sofa bed at my next house for use during Uni holidays, and this is it's cover. Goodness me I'm loving it. Crocheting has a different action, so after knitting on the Relax for so long it's helping my shoulder which can get a bit sore with relentless stocking stitch. I think it's approaching a third done so moving on well and it will be my house warming present to myself :)

Hmmm, nice....

I'm linking up with the lovely Nicole of FrontierDreams today. So hop on over to see lots of inspiring projects. Happy Saturday x