Crocheted blanket.

After being sidetracked by other projects, the regular household duties, and just plain laziness, I have finally finished crocheting the project that I first spoke about here in.... ummm... September.  This took much longer than it should have for sure and I really don't have much of an excuse. 

The end result is a blanket for Hayden.  (So really I didn't have to finish for another 3 months :D)  It's a little bit bigger than I expected so it will be a blanket that he can grow into.  I found the pattern out of a crochet book called "Cuddly Crochet."  I bought the book at a local craft store last year and have gotten a lot of use out of it, had some fun, had a little stress, and learned some new techniques.  Most of the patterns in the book are classified as "easy" and would be suitable for a somewhat beginner crocheter.  Going into this book, I only knew how to crochet a "single crochet stitch," and I now know many more stitches.  The book goes over some of the how-to's in the beginning with diagrams and pictures, it breaks down yarn weights and also gauges.  There is also a very handy glossary in the back that breaks down all the crochet abbreviations in the patterns.  The hardest thing from this book when I first started was making the hats.  My stitches tend to be a little bit larger than the author's and therefore if I made a hat with the amount of stitches she suggests, my hat was far too big-- it took some tweaking for me to figure out the edits to accommodate my stitches but I have successfully made hats for Leeland, and also for some friends' babies.  Without further ado, here is Hayden's hand crocheted sheep blanket.

I love how all the hexagons put together give the blanket a more unique shape than the typical square.  I also love (though the pictures don't show it) that the sheep are 3D.  The little sheep heads and ears are pretty fluffy and kind of pop out of the blanket-- I can totally see our baby boy sitting on this blanket very amused by that and possibly trying to yank them off.  Daniel's critique of the blanket is that he says the sheep need legs, but I think it's meant to be a bit more abstract.  Plus I would think the legs of the sheep would need to be black and I don't know that black yarn stitched onto the navy blue would show up very well. 

I am very pleased with it, and it feels good to have it completed.  Now on to figuring out what my next project will be.