The Good, the Bad, and the ugly

My first baby blanket 

 After I learned the basics from my sister, I worked on a scarf for what seemed like forever! No really, I was working on that thing for over a year. To this day, I don’t know what happened to that unfinished scarf. It probably ended up in the garbage after a fit of blind rage that I have clearly blocked out of my memory.

It wasn’t till my husband joined the military and we moved to our first duty station that I decided to pick up crocheting as a hobby. I believe it was the lack of friends, loneliness, and the thousands of miles that created seclusion from my family that truly got me back into crocheting. Ha-ha, I say that as if it were actually a pastime of mine. But whatever the reason was, I decided to pick up a hook and yarn again. Then I thought 

What should be my first real project? Oh, I know! My coworker is pregnant, I’ll make her a baby blanket.

Because you know, that’s what someone wants from a complete stranger, I had just recently started at that particular job so I was still considered the “new girl,” a baby blanket from a novice crocheter. I went ahead and did it anyways for lack of a better idea. And plus, it was going to be simple, or I thought it was, and it would be one color. Out of excitement I rushed to the craft store and had planned on just purchasing only blue skeins of yarn but zealously got the best of me and I went all out and purchased blue and green yarn.

So, like I said I chose to make a baby blanket because it was small and I thought it would be “simple,” but once again that counting issue got the best of me.

You don’t realize how important keeping count is till your blanket starts looking angled instead of straight. But with each row you unravel to re-crochet, you start to focus on the counting. After unraveling so many rows and recognizing you could’ve already been done with the project if only you could just keep the count right. So many lost rows. 

Then laziness kicks in and you think to yourself I don’t think these uneven rows will be noticeable once I throw a border on it. Once again, that was false hope because uneven rows are still noticeable even with a border and even if you try to compensate with different size stitches (i.e., sc, hdc, dc). It still ends up looking like shit, to be blunt.
 
I am grateful for my friends and family who received a crocheted gift from me in the early stages of my hobby and acted as if it were the best gift ever. Just their reaction made my heart happy, even if I felt they were ugly looking blankets. So, thank you for keeping my fire lit and giving me the courage to crochet more baby blankets as gifts. 

Happy crocheting my friends! 

Another baby blanket I made for my friend, Kacy.
This one I tried to get fancy with the design.