Seeking a Blog Rhythm and Planning a Ripple

ISO: One Blog Rhythm

I haven’t found a rhythm in combining craftwork, writing, and photography yet, but I’m working on it. I want to form a habit of writing and posting every couple of days, but when I get into a knitting, or crocheting project I find it so hard to stop and take progress photographs; I just want to keep going! At other times, I write a draft and set the accompanying project aside waiting for the opportunity to get a photo. This not only creates a delay in posting, but also interrupts the work flow of the project, making it harder to stay enthused with it. I’m also a little frustrated by being an inexperienced photographer. I sometimes don’t know how to get the results I want, especially on the heavily clouded winter days we’ve had recently.

I tell myself this will all become second nature eventually. sigh.

Luckily, it’s getting easier for me to put together a quick indoor shot like this one:

Planning a Ripple

My first step in making a ripple is choosing the colors I’ll combine and deciding their order. I weigh each color of yarn and add them up. I need at least 24 ounces of coordinating yarns; that’s the average weight of one of my kids’ blankets. This time I have more than 32 ounces of yarn, so I know I have plenty of leeway. There’s at least eight ounces each of the white, light blue and red, so they’ll become stripes two rows wide. With at least four ounces each, the navy and bright blue can become stripes one row wide. I’ve played around with color placements and have settled on the sequence shown by the line-up of skeins and balls in the photo.

I lay out the colors going as far beyond a single repeat as I can, given the number of balls and skeins I have. I’m trying to get a clear idea of how the finished blanket will look before I begin. It’s always interesting to see how the striping design will look once I’ve crocheted a color repeat or two. Sometimes I reconsider after crocheting only a few rows. Never one to rip out needlessly, I’ve been known to repeat those first “mistake rows” in reverse when I approach the other end of the blanket. I just call it a “design choice”, not a mistake, once it’s done. lol.

A Tightly Wound Yarn Haul

I don’t know why there are so many little balls of this bright blue yarn. They are very tightly wound, which makes me think they came in the box of scrap yarn I bought last spring at a Senior Center sale. By the looks of it, some of the yarn had been used and then unraveled. It was wound into tight balls, I’m assuming to remove the kinks. The result, in this case, was that I vastly underestimated the amount of yarn in the box when I looked at it. Dense tightly wound balls weigh much more than fluffy loose ones! The senior ladies offered to bag up the yarn and hold it for me while I shopped the rest of the sale. It wasn’t until I got home and weighed all those assorted bags of yarn that realized I had gotten over twelve pounds of yarn for $5! Quite a large addition to my scrap yarn stash! BTW, they’d also thrown in a few whole skeins, which I hadn’t known about. Such sweet ladies!

That’s one sale that I hope is an annual affair. I’d like to show them a page of thumbnail ripple photos, so they can see what I did with their scrap yarn!