Making! Ugly Blanket: part 1 of who knows how many…

I am an accumulator of things…yes, I admit it! I find it very hard to get rid of stuff, but of late I’ve been making a real effort – why only the other day I put three books in the office book swap box (I took one out don’t tell anyone, two out of three ain’t bad, as Meatloaf tells us).

The yarn is the biggest user of space, it’s probably insulating the house while gathering some dust and hopefully not moths but who knows?? It is all in plastic bags though. Back at the height of my yarn accumulation fervour I couldn’t not buy yarn, particularly if it was in a sale. The trouble with sale yarn is it’s usually in a sale for a reason – it’s a wierd colour, there is only one ball of it, it’s EYELASH…so I have lots of odd balls of this and that, or packs of strange stuff that came from I know not where. I also have ends of balls of yarn leftover from other projects – not enough to make a garment, not right for socks, too hard for my noggin to work out gauge to fit an existing pattern.

Then I remembered Ugly Blankets. These use up scrap yarn in huge quantities, I would only need to know one crochet stitch (I am not particularly crochet literate) and just need to make sure your yarn is all vaguely the same fatness. I opted for treble crochet because I’ve done loads of it before, so it’s kind of ingrained. Here is an earlier blanket:

Unlike this earlier blob of a blanket (it’s a very strange shape) I decided to go back and forth in stripes, which basically requires no maths whatsoever as to how many squares (< this is from Attic 24, a hugely talented crocheter) or pinwheels (see above) you might need. All I had to work out was how wide I needed this thing to be.

Reader, I guessed…I think it’s about right for a single bed. But what it’ll most likely be used for is wrapping myself up foo a long read [there’s a bookish reason for EVERYTHING] on a winters afternoon. It’s about a quarter done, and as mindless a task as I could wish for as I – with a slightly guilty ‘I could be doing something else like the hoovering’ feeling – watch re-runs of 30 year old Inspector Morse episodes on a Sunday morning (thanks, ITV3!).

Of course, there is still the chance I’ll end up dwelling in a den made of books, yarn, fabric and clay, living off tea and digestive biscuits – and it actually sounds really cosy, don’t you think…?