Knitting

I'm three rows from finishing my second-ever knitting project - a pair of baby legwarmers. Here they are in my new yarn bowl made by Tom Emerine of www.raspberrywoods.com.

Christmas afghan #2

I posted last May about winning Ellen Gormley's book, Go Crochet!, and wanting to make a project from it. Since I had made an afghan for my mother-in-law, I wanted to make one for my parents, too. My mom loves sunsets, so I wanted to make a "sunset" afghan. Originally, I hoped to make the entire afghan look like one big sunset, but once I found the "Octagon Medallion" pattern, I knew it would be better to go for a more impressionistic approach. I made the "Octagon Medallion" motifs to look like the sunset, and for the squares to fit in between the octagons, I made "Cherry Cordial," because it reminded me of clouds when I used the right colors.

The picture shows somewhat of a closeup of the squares and octagons. Don't you just love how the middle of the octagon looks like a sun?!

As you can see in the above photo, the edges were still irregular from the octagons, but I thought they looked really neat. I just finished the outside border by doing 2 rows of single crochet around, so I didn't take away from the blanket itself with the border.