It's all about the blankets

Despite the unseasonably mild weather we've been having the last few days what we've been mostly wanting to do since the new year is snuggle up under a nice warm blanket.  Mum's had caught the mitred square bug and has been busy knitting away using up all my old sock yarn.  She'd not even finished it before my sister and her cat had both started fighting over who was going to get to keep it.

Lola likes blankets.  She'd claim them all if she could! She even tries to help me decide which order to assemble the squares in.  Well help is a bit of a misnomer but she does like to be involved at all stages.

She'll even wrap herself up inside them if she can.  One day I'll have to make her one of her own.  Anyhow, back to the blankets.  The little man decided he needed a blanket of his own to snuggle up in and he'd got very definate ideas of how it should be made.  

• It needed to be crochet.
• It had to be in small squares.
• Each square had to have two rows of each colour.
• Then they had to be put together and have a few rows round the outside.

This one turned out to be a bit of a stashbuster as for a change I didn't need to buy anything to add to it.  Six balls of bonus DK from the stash a 4.5mm hook and hey presto - squares.  Each colour is used as the centre and surrounded by every other colour.  I opted to add a second band of the centre colour to each to make the squares a little bigger.  Thirty squares in all. I've crocheted them all together rather than stitching them and then gone around the outside a few times using the same colours until I'd more or less used up all the yarn. 

Ta da! One finished snuggle blanket.

Christmas Swap Parcels

So here I am back at last. Christmas is always great but juggling children, babysitters, new jobs on top of it all has proved trickier than I ever imagined and far more exhausting.  Anyhow, enough with the excuses, this post is long overdue.  I took part in the We Love Lucy Christmas swap and while I've posted a sneaky peak of the parcel I posted, I've still to post about the one I received in return.  So here it is in all it's glory and it truly was a jam packed and well thought out box of goodies.

So where do I start? 

Here's the handmade part, a flannel and some locally made soap and some earrings made by Teresa herself.  The cutest little lighthouse which is hanging from my tree as I type.

Lots of yarn and all things I'd find it hard to source myself.  Some Knit Picks cottons for me to make my own flannels with and the Bernat holidays yarn, red and sparkly (my favourite colours) and some Heart and Sole Sock yarn which is nice and soft and some super squishy alpaca fleece for spinning.  Now I just need to find the perfect patterns.

Buttons, cupcake cakes, nail files and a note pad, a candy cane shaped pen.  All christmassy themed. A pair of red gloves and a handy little project bag. Finally one of the tags on the parcels was this really pretty little red heart (also now hanging on the tree) and the pattern for a cute little bear.

All in all and truly lovely package and filled with lots of things that show that Teresa had taken the time to get to know me a little. Very thoughtful indeed.

As I mentioned at the top of this post, I should have got this all documented before Christmas and I truly wish I had.  If I'd realised beforehand quite how busy and tiring the last few weeks would be I might have thought twice about doing the swap but truth be told, I'd probably have done it anyway.  I really enjoyed putting the parcel together and I've been really lucky with my swap partner this time around.  With my lack of communication recently, not sure my partner feels the same.  Having been on the receiving end of a dodgy swap myself in the past, I understand entirely where she's coming from which makes me really disappointed with myself as I should have known better!  Anyhow, here endeth the self recriminations as overall it was a great swap.