Blonde and Blonder

Well, hello honeybuns! A new year, a new blog post, as promised.

Truth is, I had to make an appearance in Blogland, because I’ve joined a new stitch-along and the group leader wants us to update at least one a month. No, I'm not a member of the Completely-Insane-15-Starts-In-January-And-Hopefully-15-Finishes-By-December-For-The-Enjoyment-Of-The-Dangerously-Optimistic-Or-Very-Bored-Stitcher like all the rest of you. Doing something like that would absolutely ruin my joy of stitching. Instead, I’ve joined the Totally Useless SAL, which basically means you have to collect all of your orts in a glass jar as you go along and post a picture of said jar every full moon. Of all the SALs in the world, I think (I think) that this one is suffciently useless for me to be able to keep up with the requirements. So I started collecting my orts the day I signed up (roughly one month ago), and here is the first pic:

My designated TUSAL jar at present contains a whole bunch of acorns (remnants of a Fall display that I can’t bear to get rid of), so I stored the orts in an apple sauce jar for now. In this jar, ladies and perhapsly gentlemen, you see the victims of my battle with a new 2011 start and finish:

Believe me, I’m as surprised at this as you are. A start? A stitchy start? And a finish? Of the same start? Yes, yes, yes, and yes.

It’s Emma’s Work Pinkeep Drum by Stacy Nash and it’s delish. Stitched on 36 or 40 count unbleached linen (a significantly higher countage than the 28 count called for in the pattern, in any case) and stitched with DMC 830 and 918 and filled with birch chips.

Stitching it was a doddle. Finishing it would have been a doddle if I weren’t so incredibly, incurably blonde. Sewing in circles... very difficult for me.

As promised a couple of months ago, I’ve also started a Scarlet Letter and this is the one I went for in the end:

Mary Hart. *Love*

***

What about the socks? I hear you ask. Well, my second knee sock is about halfway finished, and I’m still really enjoying it, but something besides stitching and knitting has had me pre-occupied for a couple of days. Only a few weeks ago, while I was busy knitting my knee sock, I remember thinking to myself, ‘With all of these crafts I'm already enjoying and all of that time they're taking up, isn’t it fortunate that I will never, ever get the urge to crochet, because I may be forty, but I’m no granny, and crocheting is something grannies do, like my own granny used to do, and she didn’t do it well, and... she wasn’t a very nice granny anyway and... granny... granny... granny square... granny square... granny square blanket...hmmm, that would be nice, actually. Yes. A granny square blanket on my bed would be just the thing for me, wouldn’t it? Nice and warm and snugly, and apparently, crocheting is much faster than knitting. I could have a granny square blanket in two weeks’ time! Why don’t I teach myself how to crochet?!!!’

Okay, maybe the two weeks was a bit optimistic, but look what I’ve accomplished in 5 days!

And here comes the ‘blonde and blonder’ part of today’s post. I hope there are readers among you who are not as dramatically mathematically challenged as I am, because it’s driving me up the wall and I need an answer, so please, please, if you are in any way gifted in the arithmetic/statistics department, HELP ME:

I’m using 8 colours for this blanket. Each square has four rounds, so that’s four colours per square. First question: how many different squares will I be able to make? You see, I really want every single square to be different, except for two - like they used to do in the old days, with regular patchwork quilts? This leads me to my second question: how on earth do I keep track of the colour combos I’ve already used? Is there an Excel sheet or some other computer program that could help me make a list? Please don’t ask me why I just can’t crochet away and who cares if I make a couple of doubles - or trebles, for that matter. What can I say? I’m a dork. And a blonde one at that.

Yours totally uselessly stitching and knitting and chrocheting alongly,

Annemarie.