Crochety!

The sun streaming through the windows encouraged me out into the garden to take some autumn photographs - clogged up with leaves as it is! Still a few summer herbs, and good old geranium. The bird house gets used as a perching post, but not for nesting, and the large bug hotel appears empty, but the one Jim made  has three or four residents I think.

     Hanging on to my parsley for grim death! Of course, when the frost hits, that will be it for the year.

           I'm hoping the chards - white and rainbow, will see us through winter, along with the kale.

                                Back of the cottage in the late afternoon autumn sunshine.

                                              Really pleased the bug house is being used!

                                                   And still the cranesbill survives!

I've really got back into crochet the last month or so; perhaps it's the weather! Lovely to cosy up with a basket of gorgeous wool and a crochet hook when the evenings are dark and the temperature drops. Colour-schemes buzzing round my head all the time.

I'm very excited that my wool has arrived for Lucy's (Attic 24)  latest  "Moorland" blanket, though it has to sit on the back burner until January when she begins the Crochet Along pattern on her blog. I haven't even opened the bag in case I'm tempted to dive in and use the wool!

I do have a fair amount of Stylecraft yarn which I've just boosted with a small delivery, in order to begin my own latest blanket which I am calling "OCEAN". I'm using the Lucy pattern from her Cosy Stripe Blanket, but have come up with my own colour scheme. A little like her Moorland idea, I used the natural colours of an outdoors scene. I wanted to depict the colours from the grassy dunes, down to the beach, and into the ocean. I haven't used a photograph, and my colours repeat as a block rather than as Lucy has done hers following the vertical striations of the photograph. (If that sounds skew-iff,  I mean the striations are horizontal in a vertical context.) I think that's what I mean anyway.

This is my "Cosy Stripe" blanket, using Lucy's pattern and colour scheme. This is our favourite of all the Lucy blankets I've made. It works up very quickly and soothingly.

OK so this is MY colour scheme for "OCEAN" It begins with four shades of green, depicting the grassy dunes, the sea-buckthorn, samphire and other seashore grasses. Then comes the dry sand at the top of the beach, followed by the damper sand closer to the sea. Then comes the almost white surf, and four more shades of blue as the water gets deeper and further away from the shore.  This 'colour repeat' is only 22 rows whereas Lucy's moorland depicts the entire vertical slice of her photograph, and is one single scheme with no repeat. (although colours are repeated obviously).

Here I'm just beginning the first repeat. I love all these shades, so am excited afresh each time I change colour! "OCEAN" is intended as a gift for someone special, but no more about that just yet.

As a break from the blanket I'm using up all those little balls of left-overs to make solid granny squares. NO IDEA what I'm going to do with them, but they are building up nicely into a little pile; I'll just keep going with them until I have sufficient to do something with.

Each little ball makes roughly four or five squares. More left-overs will accrue, so obviously this is an on-going project.

                   More greens required - and some shades of red too, I think. Time will tell.

Rummaging through the sewing room, I found a basket of multicoloured granny squares which I began years and years ago - I'd forgotten all about them. They are a pretty disparate crowd, but I have thoughts about adding a couple of rows and pulling them together with one or two colours, so they will blend more easily. Again, no real idea of the outcome, but there will be enough of them for a throw.

The light in my sewing room wasn't the best when I took this shot; the squares are much brighter than they appear here. And of course, greens never seem to come out properly on the blog, for some reason!

No other stitchery going on at the moment, I am obsessing about crochet - and you know me - one obsession at a time! But of course I am cooking and reading, and even doing a little gentle walking! Yes! Me! I hope you are all finding something  lovely to obsess about and are enjoying yourselves.

EDIT :  APOLOGY!!!!  Whilst publishing the comments for the previous post, I inadvertently clicked on the "DELETE" instead of "PUBLISH" but I cannot for the life of me remember whose comment it was. Please, if you commented and haven't seen it posted, let me know - I never delete a comment and would hate someone to think I have whisked their kind comment away without publishing it!