Italian Dish Knits

Are you on Pinterest?  I love Pinterest. I get so many great ideas from that site. Being a knitter, I love all the gorgeous knitting photos there.  But one photo recently caught my eye .  It was  photo of a crocheted throw, all in grey.  It looked like it was made up of a bunch of crocheted squares.  I wanted to make a throw like that.

Problem is, I’m not a crocheter.  I crocheted a Granny Stripes afghan this past year, but it was a no brainer.  There was no pattern and you just did the same stitch over and over.  So in order to make this new throw, I was going to have to learn crochet and learn how to read a crochet pattern.  So that is what I’ve been doing these past few weeks.  Because of all the great tutorials on the internet, it was pretty easy.

Then I had to pick out a yarn.  I only knit with wool, never cotton or acrylic or anything.  I did a test square out of wool and it looked like this:

I wasn’t happy with the stitch definition.  The photo that I saw in Pinterest looked like it might have been made from cotton or blend, something heavier.  I bought a skein of Cascade Pima Cotton and did another test square.  It was just right – the cotton really shows the stitches well and it had the feel I wanted.

Flower Burst Crochet Square #3 from Chris Simon  (above)

This is a square I cobbled together from two patterns

I decided to add just a little bit of color to some of the squares, although most of them will be grey.  I cobbled together parts of two different crochet squares to come up with one that I like.

I’m having a blast crocheting – it’s so easy, goes so fast and it’s way easier than knitting to rip back and fix something. So I’m going to be knitting a bunch of crochet squares in the coming months.  When I get them all done and crocheted together, I’ll post the photos.

My secret Christmas knitting is over and so I started something for myself right before Christmas.  I’ve had this Granny Stripe Blanket in my Ravelry favorites for a while and I was just itching to get to it.  My husband has commented sometimes that we don’t have any kind of quilt or throw back in our bedroom if someone wants to take a nap.  Perfect time to correct that.  I just had a hard time deciding between making this blanket or the African Flower Hexagon Blanket  or the Skipping Stones Afghan.  I made a couple of test African Flower Hexagons and decided there was too much color switching and ends to weave in and I didn’t want to mess around with sewing together all those hexagons.  The Granny Stripes just seemed like such a good mindless piece to make.  I don’t ever crochet, so this is kind of fun.   I’ll post photos when it’s done!