Finally!  I have finished my sweat pea blanket and I did try to finish it in time to enter into my local flower show craft section, but, I am afraid my fingers were just too sore to keep the tension in the yarn so my border went a bit wavy.  Although this one was not good enough to enter, I entered my Cosy autumn coloured stripe blanket instead.  Woo-hoo, it got first place in the crochet and knitted section.  So that, along with my paintings and a photograph of snails on a wall, got me the Handicraft trophy.  I won’t be attempting any more large blankets but I may do some smaller Granny blankets instead as they are a bit easier and won’t take quite so long to accomplish.  I will now be getting my paints out again – maybe I will just play about with art journalling to get me in that mindset and playing with pens and paints before they all dry up.

I just love the muted bright colours in this blanket.  I can’t tell you how many times I ripped it back when I found I had made mistakes but I finally got there in the end and just before we had that nasty cold weather.  Lucy over at Attic24 has a fab tutorial on how to make this lovely blanket with lots of pictures.  I think I have now got the crochet bug so I will do small projects often to make sure I don’t forget what I have learned.

My first attempt at a Granny blanket.  Many years ago my auntie Lena gave me a small Granny blanket which had become so well used that it was rather tatty and full of hole so I thought at first I could maybe mend it but it a lot of the threads were almost bare so I sought out a pattern that looked fairly easy and gave it a go.   I actually started it a few years ago but gave up because crocheting hurt my shoulder and I just couldn’t get to grips with it at all.  But I still had all the wool just lying in a bag so I gave it another go and this time I cracked it.  I made the squares using the tutorial on lovely Lucy’s blog over at Attic24 then added a wide border. The problem with leaving a project for a couple of years is that when you run out of your favourite shade of wool you find that the makers have either discontinued that colour or you get a different dye lot and the shades don’t quite match-up.  I also found that if I kept my right elbow touching the top of my wheelchair tyre then I am less prone to lifting my shoulder up therefore I got less pain.  I liked it so much that I went on to make a bigger cosy blanket again using one of Lucy’s tutorials.