Crocheted Receiving Blankets!

When Ellis was born, my partner's mother and sister made us several amazing flannel receiving blankets with hand-crocheted edging. We loved them.

We still do.

They're bright and colorful. They make me smile.

I've been wanting to try my hand at making my own. They seemed like they would have a high effort to satisfaction ratio. As in, I would feel really pleased without working too hard. It turns out that they are a bit more labor-intensive than I would have thought at first glance, but they are totally worth it. And of course the first time you try something, it's always a bit harder and takes more time. Which is another way of saying the first try will always suck more than the subsequent tries.

I used some flannel we had in our stash, but I had to buy new yarn because I didn't have anything in the right weight. And since I was going to JoAnn's anyway and flannel was on sale for $2.48/yard (cue the choir of angels singing for that), I figured why not pick up extra? So I have enough for three blankets.

The first one is almost complete. It's all over but the weaving in.

Sidebar: Why is it that although I have a difficult time photographing detail on stitches or fabric, the few bits of dog hair show up beautifully? Perhaps I should take my camera off the "Crappy View" setting? Although in all honesty, my camera is a few years old and that might be the only setting that works anymore. And although I have been taking pictures since my sweet pink Kodak 110 in the seventh grade, I still pretty much feel like a novice.

These blankets involve a lot of steps, which is what makes them a bit tricky. I had to cut the flannel into a square, hem the edges, blanket-stitch all around, weave in the ends from that, single-crochet all the way around, and then do the fun edging. Still, I would call them a beginner project. I'm thinking of doing a tutorial because I had some trouble actually finding good instructions for making them. Perhaps because they are so easy, nobody thinks they need to explain them. Or perhaps I'm the only one who thinks they rock. But a tutorial is tough because it involves taking pictures as you go along and most of my working time is at night when the light is, you know, darkness. So I'm not making any promises on that.

Flowers In The Transom

We have a lovely transom in our kitchen. So far, I haven't taken advantage of it. When we moved in, I was 3 or 4 months pregnant--not the ideal time for decorating things that are up--and when I wasn't pregnant anymore, there was this baby. Babies make you busy. And slow. And I think I am not as smart as I used to be, but that's neither here nor there. The point is this week-end I finally decorated the transom.

As a side-note, I'm a big fan of transoms. Aren't you? So romantic, so vintagey. I feel like I'm a New York City tenement, but in a good way. Or I'm in a film noir playing the sexy girl Friday in the front office. We have just a normal plain window transom over our kitchen door that leads into the back room--a door that likely used to head outside before the back of the house was added on. But there are some cooler ones here.

Back on track, I've been planning what to put in our transom for two years. I've had many ideas, some better than others. I settled on hanging little crocheted flowers.
Cheap, colorful, and very much in keeping with our whole kitchen vibe, which is a blend of cheap, colorful, vintage, and useful with a healthy dollop of a bunch of crap that doesn't go anywhere so just sits on our kitchen table making us crazy.

I copied an old flower I had laying around that I know I used a pattern for but now have lost track of what it was. I used 100% cotton from Peaches and Cream and Lion Kitchen Cotton, my main kitchen crochet yarns, though I'm secretly longing to try some fancier cotton yarn. . .

I made a few flowers and went to hang them. I am a bit of a corner-cutter and I have a sprained wrist so I can't exactly hammer AND we have lost the nails, which is a scary thought in a house with a toddler. So I had decided to tape the flowers up there. And frankly, not enough people are taping hopelessly random crap in their transoms these days. So I got up on my chair with my Scotch tape. That's right, people. I wasn't even going to use good tape, tape likely to hold for more than a day. And what did I find but pushpins I'd nailed up there MacGyver-style last Christmas to hang lights from but then was too lazy to remove. Good for me and my lazy self. 5 pins for 5 flowers and I was good to go.

I tried to take worse pictures than this, but it just wasn't possible. I was losing the light and taking pictures of what was essentially a corner. And sadly, the light since then has been about as photo-worthy as light in, say, a basement hospital cafeteria.