How I do 'random'

I am making a granny hexagon blanket for my living room. The plan is to have three different shades of beige, cream and brown in the middle of each hexagon, then one round of red - and I have four different reds - and finally cream round that I will use to join all the hexagons as I go.
I wanted the middles to look scrappy and random. Some people would maybe just buy some yarn and would randomly pick a colour for every round. But my way of being random is to use formula to calculate how many different combinations  of three I can have with six colours and then with every group of three there is six possible combinations. This stage is now completed :)
In total I have 120 circles every one of them is three rounds of different colours and none two are the same :)

Now, the second stage: I have put all my groups of six in order I am going to join them and I have assigned two different reds to every group. Just to make sure that every red will be used evenly and spread evenly on the blanket.
Part of me would like to let go and just pull random yarns from he basket but a much bigger part enjoys my geeky approach to randomness...

I'm blue, dabudidabuda...

I am working hard on Zuzanna's dress. Almost all celtic knot appliqué is now finished, and soon I am going to move to the very important skirt construction.

Although I am really enjoying the process I would like my dreams were less blue now and weren't all about dancing butterflies...
There is some other crafting happening in the background but no time left to share or to take a picture. But I plan to catch up after 14th September.

Big project

The luxurious velvet, a bit of shiny satin, sequins and a lovely, deep royal blue... This is the perfect combination for another irish dancing dress for my lovely Zuzanna. The deadline is 14th September, West of Scotland Championships or actually the week before so that the teacher can approve. 

So... Good luck to me :D

Hot hot hot

It is very, very hot. Yesterday was declared the hottest day of this summer and today is even hotter. I am sewing up my squares with my feet in the bowl filled with cold water and I am trying to remember why do I need a woolly blanket... There was something about cold, Scottish, autumn nights, rain and wind....

It is just a blur...

Lesson learned

Last year I made jumpers for my boys and I promised myself: no more stripes. But of course I was tempted by to many lovely colours and the easiest way to combine them were stripes.

I hate working with more than one ball of yarn at the same time. I hate changing colours while working in rounds. I hate decreasing while working in rounds. 

And I hate weaving in hundreds of yarn ends... There is plenty other, more pleasant things to do when drinking my everyday cup of coffee. 

And then came that last one cup, last ends to weave in and it was all finished:

Now I can relax. And somehow despite really hot summer try to photograph these jumpers on my boys.

A lot to do

There are boys' jumpers...

There is Zuzanna's dress...

I've started Adam's blanket... I just couldn't go on without crocheting...

And there is still 165 squares waiting to be a blanket...
And we are going on holidays in 5 days, just for 5 weeks ;). So there is a lot of thinking, decisions making, planing: what to finish now, what to pack with me, what will be the best for 27 hour car journey, what will be the best to crochet when in the frying pan my mum's summer garden so that it won't stick to my hands, and finally what yarn I am going to buy??
Plus, to add a bit more to my keen hands tomorrow my friends are going to have their wedding - tiny, tiny one but still - and I am making the cake and the bouquet.
And I still have to do all the packing! Brrr...
In the meantime on my kitchen windowsill something is growing:

And I am worried they still gonna be to small to transfer them to the bigger pots and move them to the big, scary garden. We'll see :)

Blanket is being finished

A few months ago I started a blanket for our bedroom. I just had to despite long list of other things that should be made first. But I was cold, and I thought I could use all these odd balls of yarn that mysteriously grown in my stash.
I decided to go for "solid granny square" which isn't very 'granny' at all but I wanted this blanket to be quite thick. I. Only needdd 165 squares.
I started slowly, square after square, colour after colour... Soon it was obvious that I am going to need a lot of new colours.
Fiona from my knitting group showed me a fantastic way to make a sampler to carry around: you just make tiny squares and put them on a stitch holder:

It was so easy to match another colour to the ones I had before that I ended up with 23!!

Now all my 165 squares are finished. It feels strange... It was a perfect project to carry around and this is probably the reason I made them so quickly. I made a spreadsheet to track my progress and it even calculated the percentage of completion.

Can you see a 100% at the bottom?
Now I only have to so al these squares up...