knitting a baby blanket

I'm getting ready to embark on my first large-scale knitting project. I've knit a little pouch and a scarf, both fairly basic, easy-to-do sort of things. Now I'm going to try a baby blanket. I'm modifying the pattern from one I found at Lion Brand's website. I'll keep the basic blocks (about 3 x 3 in squares), but I'm changing the color scheme. The girl that I'm making the blanket for doesn't know if it's going to be a boy or a girl yet, so I'm doing the typical white/green/yellow color scheme. Ideally, it will end up like this:

G Y W G Y W G Y W

W G Y W G Y W G Y

Y W G Y W G Y W G

G Y W G Y W G Y W

W G Y W G Y W G Y

Y W G Y W G Y W G

G Y W G Y W G Y W

W G Y W G Y W G Y

Y W G Y W G Y W G

The real kicker will be the fact that I'm going to have sew all the little blocks together. I hate having to sew pieces together. Almost as much as I hate weaving in the ends. Those two steps seem to give me the most trouble.

But there's nothing like facing your fears and challenging yourself. And sewing all these little squares are going to be a challenge.

too busy to blog

Okay, maybe I haven't been too busy to blog. More like just too plain lazy. Even though I have been doing some serious yarn-crafting in the mean time. I managed to crochet a shawl in under two weeks (given as a gift to a grieving friend who just lost her mother). I was my first sort of "over-drive" crochet project, where I had an extremely tight time line to follow. It helped that I mentioned to another friend I was thinking about crocheting up a prayer shawl...I had the added sense of responsibility knowing I couldn't just put down the hook and say "Well, no one knew I was doing this...so I can't disappoint anyone if I don't" - which by the way is one of my favorite excuses for putting down a project and never picking it up again.

Also, Christmas is approaching, and I still have a few projects I want to whip up before the holidays. The beret for my mum-in-law is complete, and I just finished knitting up a scarf for my sis-in-law (which by the way is my second completed knitting projecting since I started to teach myself a few months ago). I'm now working on my other sis-in-laws gauntlet style gloves...which are going surprisingly well. If I could just commit myself to crocheting 30 minutes a day, I would probably have them finished. But I keep get caught up in some of the novels I've been reading.

Only a completely non-yarn related note, I've gone to the dark side. That is, I've started reading Austen fiction - novels written based on Jane Austen's works. I know this makes me a traitor to my two best friends (we're all Jane Austen nerds), and I know I've spent the past year turning up my nose at these novels, crying out "Geez, make your own characters, idiots" - ironic since I used to write fan fiction. But the lure of the novels proved too great, and I've fallen. I just finished Me and Mr. Darcy last week and I have to admit, I liked it.

So that brings me up to date on not one, but two, of my major hobbies. Yep. That's it.