Crafting before 2025 kicks off!

After making it through the yoke and starting the short row shaping on my Melrose (check out the pattern, it's available now:  Ravelry: Melrose pattern by Sophie Lucente) test knit, I can experiment a bit this weekend.

It takes me about 21 minutes to complete a row of the Yuletide Blanket. I'll recalculate the number of rows needed as of the start of 2025. I've made a bit of progress and if I can get a couple of rows every few days, I think there is hope to get it done by next Christmas. Since there isn't any assembly and the finishing should be very simple, I'm not as concerned with the progress during the first half of the year. I'm using a 5 mm hook per the pattern and using my rainbow Furls hook.

With the Battenberg blanket, I have the first five days of the 2023 Advent Calendar from Jessie of Yarn Over New York. Can you guess the theme? It was a space theme and the colors are so fun! I'm using a 3.5 mm hook from my plastic interchangeable Tunisian crochet hook set.

Ok, here is the breakdown of time and counts.

• It took a little less than 5 minutes to wind the 10g mini skein
• 30 minutes to crochet one square with 5 rows
• 2 squares from each mini skein
• The squares measure 4" x 4" making the 12 x 15 squares a 4ft by 5ft blanket excluding any edging

I looked at my available yarn aside from the 24 advent and I also have the ten 20g skeins for the count down to 2024 from Jessie too! These will look pretty with this as well. So...to the math!

That means that I'm getting one square out of about 5g and I'll have 450g of the multicolor yarn, which would give me 92 multicolor squares and I'd need 92 of the solid squares with 70g for the edging. This would make a total of 186 squares. This doesn't divide super easily, but if I think of it as 12 x 15 (or 180 squares) as my starting point.

Next, I made the first of the 24 squares for the Yorkshire blanket. I was hoping to get one square out of 10g, but it looks like the first one took 12g. I'll need to use larger scraps than my 10g mini skeins. I have a couple of beautiful green hand dyed skeins that I was thinking of using as a backup too. There is a calendar with the pattern that shows how timeline worked from July to November of last year. I'd like to get the 24 squares completed in the first 4 months of the year and give myself lots of wiggle room for the assembly. Also, if I can make a few more before the start of the year, I'll be sitting well with the overall timing.