Slacks for Ella Funt

Progress is being made on the afghan. After taking it with me for Passover in Philly with E’s family a couple of cold yucky weekends spent entirely in the apartment in pajama pants, I now have one stripe of each color of yarn. It looks like I have enough yarn now to make maybe a third of the blanket if I can get three stripes per yarn ball, so I’ll have to restock at some point. It’s been a good activity for the non-spring we’ve been having—too cold to want to spend any time outside. And now that we have dvr on the fancy new tv, I can stock up on my favorite tv to watch while I’m crocheting.
Lately, this has been lots of Northern Exposure reruns which seem to be on every day. I always loved that show, but I don’t really want to watch them all in order on dvd—it’s better to be surprised with each episode when it appears. Besides, with dvd I feel obligated to start at the beginning and the beginning of Northern Exposure isn’t that good. Between dvr and the new chair, I’m pretty content.
The main problem with crochet is that, while I can crochet and watch tv at the same time, I can’t crochet and read at the same time. It’s one or the other. So I’m falling way behind on my reading. I’ve been picking up a slew of things from the library and they’re all sitting there while I crochet. I’m trying to balance, but I just can’t seem to find enough time to crochet or read as much as I want to. The whole job thing really gets in the way.

I saw this on a craft blog and decided I had to make one. Never mind that I have no idea how to crochet. And have not been very successful at knitting. And of course I wouldn’t want to start with something small.
So I checked out a pile of crochet books from the library. I managed to teach myself the stitchs I needed to make the ripple blanket. I didn’t bother to learn any of the other stitches (I’m lazy like that). And started.

So far I have this. I know it’s just two stripes, but it’s progress. It’s far from perfect, but I’m pretty happy with it. It’s taking a long time partially because I’m pretty slow and partially because it’s really wide—I want it to fit on our queen size bed. I bought a pile of yarn in bright colors—red, orange, celery green, chocolate brown, royal purple, pale blue, teal, and navy—to match the bright colors in our apartment. I have no plan for color sequence, just going to make it up as I go along. I am finding crochet easier than knitting—it seems to only need two hands, one for hook and one for yarn, whereas knitting always seemed like it needed three. And the size of my stitches seem to be more consistent with crochet.

I’m not sure how long this is going to take me. I’m hoping to finish before it gets too hot to have it draped across my lap. If I don’t finish it by then, I suspect it will sit around until fall.