That Was A Long Absence! Plus A Hexie Update...

Wow, that wasn’t meant to be such a long break between posts!! I can’t believe it was back in May that I last posted!!

That was entirely unintentional, I was just living my life and I guess that for a while my life didn’t include blogging…  It included plenty of other stuff though, and I will do my best to catch up on the highlights over a few blog posts to come.

During my bloggy absence I have mostly been quite sociable, meeting and making some new brilliant friends. I have been very active too, mostly with mountain biking and a bit of kayaking thrown in. I’ve done a little bit of travelling when my friend came to stay – that will definitely be worth sharing! I haven’t been so crafty as usual during this time though, maybe that was connected to my lack of interest in blogging?

More recently though, I have got back into the crafty side of life. It happened very suddenly, one day I just fancied staying in and going online – on Pinterest specifically. I spent aaaaaages looking at lots of colourful crochet goodness, surfing the links to read about various creations. Dipping in and out of a few favourite crafty blogs. This inspired me to dig out some crochet of my own, and get to work again. Not as easy as it sounds, as my personal life was in a bit of turmoil at this point, and all of my crafty stuff was in storage (from when I had emptied out my place ready to accommodate my friend and her kids). I had a frustrating delay of several days of longing for crochet activity before I was able to get cracking.

I eventually dug out some stuff though, deciding that my Cotton Doily Hexagons were the place to start. I played around with them for a little bit – it felt surprisingly difficult to actually get started after thinking about it so much. In the end, I decided to start hooking together some of the finished hexies. I knew I didn’t have quite enough for a finished blanket, but I thought that at least if I started putting them together I could better judge how many more were needed. In my eagerness to get started though I forgot to take another photo of a lovely tall stack of hexagons! Dammit!!

I only thought of that once I had used up quite a few hexies:

So to make up for that I took some other photos of lovely piles of smooshy hexies, so lovely to see :)

These hexies are quite large, so when hooking them together they make pleasingly quick progress. I soon had a few rows of double-bed-sized strips of hexies. At this point I decided it would be a good idea to plan out where I would put the remaining hexagons. I was putting them together randomly with no real plan, so I didn’t want to end up with a disproportionate amount of any one colour in the final rows.

To make the plan, I simply played around with the hexies themselves on the floor, getting a reasonably balanced random layout set up. Then I just wrote out the colour order, and stacked up the hexies row by row.

And this is as far as I have gotten now, difficult to get a good photo unfortunately:

I’m loving it!! I’m only 2 rows away from finishing this main part of the blanket, and I have half of those hexagons already hooked up – I just need to whip up a few other colours. Then I’m hoping I will have enough yarn to fill the gaps with half hexies! I don’t think I will have  enough yarn for the border I’ve designed for this blanket, which is a shame. I don’t want to have to order more of this yarn! Hopefully I can work something out :)

In the meantime, I have been figuring out Ravelry a bit more, if you fancy checking me out here :)   This foray into Ravelry has also allowed me to discover that the pattern for these hexies can be found in Jan Eaton's The Encyclopedia of Crochet Techniques.

Well, I don't feel like I quite have my blogging voice back just yet - not helped by the fact I am writing this hurriedly in between an afternoon and a morning work shift, and that I have so far been interrupted twice by other work-related phone calls...  but I do feel like I have my crochet mojo back, and I still have more to share later :)