Babyblanket — CrochetAlong

The babyblanket is coming along nicely. Another 10 rows, finally the edging and we’ll be done.

Crazy to think about it.

Even though we only started in mid October it feels like I have been in this forever. We had tulips, and granny stripes, and bobbles (single- and two colored); we had the spike stitch as well as the star stitch. All in all, 110 rows in the colors of the rainbow. To make up the pattern, to write the instructions was a lot of fun (even though more sophisticated, more complex than I thought it would be).

This is where we got last Friday:

Babyblanket Babydecke Crochet AlongIf you’re interested in looking at everyone else’s beautiful blankets have a look at my Facebook account.

Last night, I finished the “prototype,” the archetypal blanket. Like I said: Crazy to think about it …

photos CAL Babydecke / baby blanket

Between October and December 2013 the pattern to this blanket was published in German on Jessica’s blog ≈ as a crochet along in 13 parts. My idea was to teach beginners how to improve their skills and to encourage them to accomplish a “bigger task” such as a (baby) blanket.

They were introduced to several (more or less) complicated stitches, “embedded” into crochet basics, such as sc, hdc, and dc rows. Each session consisted of 10 rows – including (at least) 1 special stitch.

Comments, feedback, and pictures were (and still are!) very welcome over at facebookCAL Babydecke Teil 2So sehen die ersten 20 Reihen der Babydecke aus. / This is how the first 20 rows of our babyblanket CAL look like.

Danke für die wunderbaren Bilder und Mails, die Ihr uns seither geschickt habt! / Thanks a million for all those wonderful pictures and mails that you’ve sent ever since!

Bilder der fertigen Decken sind in unserer Galerie / Pictures of all finished blankets can be found here.

Dank an Alle die mitgemacht haben! / Thanks a lot for joining!

A German CAL

Hooray! I finished both blankets last night! The acrylic blanket measures 42″ x 42″; the sock yarn blanket is almost twice as big: 44″ x 70″ and I am perfectly happy with both of them. Looks like the smaller one will be for a baby in Washington (as planned), whereas the sock yarn blanket gets to stay with us. At least for now :). I have been crocheting those blankets since June 1 and – believe it or not – I am still excited, hooked, and determined to start over and make another.

Hannah's blanket

This time it will be different though as I designed my own blanket together with Jessica (over at schoenstricken.de)! It is made of cotton yarn in rainbow colors and will have the size of a baby blanket (27″ x 35″) once it is done. And with Christmas approaching at an alarming rate (…) we decided to serialize the pattern as a German CAL.

The whole thing was triggered off in summer when I introduced the idea of a CAL to Jessica’s readers as a guest blogger. CALs are not very popular in Germany (yet!), but the feedback we received on that blog post was tremendous. Shortly after, we started to meet once the week. I would crochet while Jessica would take pictures and slowly but steadily a colorful “beginner blanket” would emerge.

Neither Jessica nor I have any intentions to reinvent the wheel. That is to say, the patterns I use have been used before. Some of them I learned with Hannah. Others are taken from books or the net. However, the composition is totally ours and we love it.

Tonight we posted the first 10 rows. I have not been that excited since waiting for a test to be returned in school. Fortunately, all comments are positive throughout!! And I am very much looking forward to next Friday and the next 10 rows … 🙂

Easy Owl

Last night I ran out of yarn – no chance to work on either the ottoman cover or the African Flower blanket. Instead, I spent a long time reading (and admiring) my favorite blogs to finally crochet a little owl from stash just like Jacquie in UK and Janette in NZ. And while choosing colors and following the perfect tutorial (thank you!) I mused how small the world has become with everyone writing blogs and speaking English …

So here’s the German owl:

crochet owl

PS (24hrs. later): … and then there were two …

2 easy owls