Lady Adventure

My efforts to declutter continue, hampered primarily by my husband's need to keep everything Just In Case. His grandparents were pre-war children, his parents were post-war children, my husband was born in the affluence of 1970s Germany - but he has the pack-rat instincts of someone on rations. Yesterday, while rummaging in the wardrobe for clean bed linen (an adventure in itself - I'm almost afraid to lean in too far, in case I topple over and end up in Narnia), I found a bag of odd socks, which my husband had clearly hidden for cleaning emergencies.
Awwww, you say. Isn't he thrifty? What a good husband!
No. No, he's not.
This is third such bag of orphan socks and abandoned underwear that he has put aside for cleaning rags. I simply do not know where all of these socks have come from - and, more disturbingly, I have no idea where their partners have disappeared to. Clearly, there are three bags full of odd socks whizzing around in an alternate universe, not knowing their matches are here, hidden in my wardrobe. One of these bags even came into the relationship with him: yes, that's right -  I have known his bag of odd socks as long as I have known him. I'm surprised he didn't organise a pageboy on our wedding day to strew the aisle with odd stockings as a sign of our undying love.

And the thing is this: on the rare occasion that we do need an old sock for cleaning purposes - e.g. to rub in furniture wax on our table - he produces one of these ancient rags with a triumphant flourish.
"Aha!" he says. "And YOU told me to throw them away!"
Being a good wife, I bow my head and pretend to stand corrected. If I did throw his socks away, we'd immediately have a sock emergency and he'd never forgive me for this crime, so I've made my peace with the socks.
Mostly.
Okay, I'm about to do a volte-face, which is going to come across as rather ironic, given the above rant. But such is my honesty, I'm going to do it anyway.
Whilst in the Narnia wardrobe, I also found a bag with a baby blanket partially sewn together. I had even put the yarn in there, too. Thankfully, I can remember putting it there - I put it aside before I started on some of my big blankets last year, and wasn't really motivated to finish them. But in the spirit of tidying up, I took them out, finished off all the leftover squares and sewed them together


I finished the coloured squares blanket that you saw recently:

And on Wednesday I'll show you the coloured patchwork squares, with a slightly enlarged border. We'll have a look at it and see how it pleases us then. By the way, Paula asked what I'd planned to do with the brightly coloured yarn in the last post. I have no plans yet, but such a nice rainbow of colours is sure to find a home in a blanket or a cushion or something nice.

Granny Squares. They're how I learned to crochet - taught, by the way, by my Great-Aunt Christina. Sure, I can do all kinds of fancy stuff, but these are brainless and comforting, the perfect January project. I always have at least one baby blanket on hand for surprise babies (they pop up all over the place in springtime, the little beasties). The colour scheme is one of  the familiar go-to colour combos that requires little thinking: the joys of monochrome.




True monochrome should start with a darker colour that gradually becomes lighter, as though white paint was being added to the darker colour, bit by bit. When picking out the colours, though, you have to make sure you do it by daylight or there's a possibility that you might make a colour booboo:


What went awry on the left? Well, I had a nice, cool pastel green plus a cool, woody dark green - and I thought I had a suitable green for the middle. Sadly, though, when I looked at it by daylight, I noticed that the middle green was too acidic, a warm apple green that includes a touch of yellow. In other words, it clashed. So out it went.

Now it's done and wrapped up ready to go. On to the next project - Anny's eagle eyes spotted it in the last post, so as soon as we have enough sunshine to take a decent photo, I'll show you My True Scrapblanket: not a single skein was purchased in the making!