“Carrot Cake” lap blanket

Unlike the last project I posted about, this lap blanket offered me no frustrations at all: just smooth sailing from start to finish, plus the fun of using a new yarn. I was given a gift certificate to the local fancy yarn store, and so this is actually my first foray out of acrylic-land. This was worked up with three(ish) skeins of Ella Rae Seasons yarn, in the colourway “carrot cake”. I liked it; it’s a soft, springy wool blend with long gradient transitions between colours that ended up making a wonderful stripe. Best of all, it promises — despite the wool content — to be washable.

I worked this up using (my beloved) moss stitch, with a J hook. At that size, the individual stitches really stand out — which gives an effect that reminds me a bit of houndstooth:

The “ish” designation appended to my skein-count is because I had to chop off several lengths each time I changed skeins, so that the pattern would be more or less consistent. I don’t mind; making prayer squares for church means that I always have a use for those little balls of scrap yarn.

It even works as intended!

Aunt Thirza’s Lapghan

I made a lapghan! — otherwise known as a lap blanket, I suppose, but lapghan is way more fun to say than that. This is another piece for the prayer shawl ministry at church, made from a pattern provided by another woman who’s part of it; the above-named Aunt Thirza was her husband’s aunt. She apparently had made over seventy of these for a local hospital, crocheting well into her nineties. And it’s a great pattern! I will see if I can get permission to publish it — and then if I can translate it back out of the super-abbreviated version I wrote down.

This was made from a very large ball of Loops & Threads “Impeccable Big! worsted” yarn (yes, the italics and exclamation point are part of the actual name), in the colourway “earth”. I worked it all up on a J hook. It’s a very simple pattern where you’re just repeating two rows — one is a bunch of loops anchored to the row below with single crochet, and the other is clusters of double-crochet done in the loops, with a chain stitch in between them. At the finish, you’ve got a row of loops on each end in which to stick some tassels if desired. I like the result; it’s a little like granny stripes, except the blocks are stacked on top of each other instead of interlocked. I was also tickled to see that the Loops & Threads pooled!

Here we are with a banana for scale. This would be very easy to scale up into a larger project such as a full-size blanket, as the only thing you have to worry about is that your starting chain is divisible by four. This was a nice size to work with; not too big to carry around with me, and large enough to cover one regular-sized lap, or several small ones.