Oceanic Blanket - January

 

The other Jimmy Beans club that I joined this year is the 2021 Blanket Club.  I have joined once in the past, when they were doing colors inspired by the Zodiac, but I never knit that blanket because it was just too boring.  There is both a knit and a crochet pattern with the club.  I am doing the crochet pattern.  You get a skein a month and crochet two squares.  It appears that the pattern will be the same, judging from the February PDF and the pictures of the blanket.  The pattern calls for a 5.5 mm hook, but I used a 5 mm hook.  My square came out to 9 inches, while the pattern calls for 10 inches, but I like how mine came out.  I used about 40 grams of yarn out of a 97 gram skein.  Now I just need to make another one, and I need to finish it soon, the February skein is on its way.  The yarn is Malabrigo Rios, which I’ve not worked with before, and the color this month is Magenta.

Pattern:  Oceanic Blanket by Shelly Husband

Yarn:  Malabrigo Rios

Hook:  US H (5 mm)

Claude the Octopus

 

When I first started knitting, way back at the turn of this millennium I became obsessed with Adrienne Vittadini patterns.  I loved the sophistication of their style and I bought pattern books and yarn.  Back then I always bought yarn for patterns that I wanted to knit right away, on the theory that the yarn could be discontinued later when I finally got around to knitting the pattern.  It is a habit that has contributed to my rather large stash, but it has paid off.  One of the Adrienne Vittadini yarns that I have in my stash is Dianna.  This yarn is 51% cotton, 49% acrylic, and comes in 50 gram/87 yard balls, and I have 27 balls in my stash in 5 colors.  I did knit a top out of it, and didn’t really like how it knit up, so I left it in deep stash and moved on.

Lately I’ve been going through my deep stash and deciding what to do with it.  I’ve given some away to friends and I almost gave this away to a friend of mine that crochets and can’t work with wool, but then I saw Claude the Octopus on Ravelry and I fell in love.  I looked at the colors in my stash of Dianna and realized that I had colors that would work in the quantities that I need.  This baby is taking 13 skeins, almost half of what I have in my stash.  So last weekend I grabbed a hook and started crocheting, and I am loving it.  I’ve been eyeing Amigurumi for awhile now, but this is the first one I’ve attempted, and I am hooked - pun intended.  The picture above is the head/body (upside down).  I’ve almost finished the top side of the tentacles.

This is the very start.

And this is the head/body before I started really decreasing and had to start stuffing it.

And these are the colors I’m using.  The off white will be the underside, and the rose will be the suckers.  The dark blue is the edging color that you use to join the top and the bottom together.

Pattern:  Claude the Octopus by Kate E. Hancock

Yarn:  Adrienne Vittadini Dianna

Hook:  4 mm (G)