Once upon a time I acquired a pattern or kit for a cat-themed cross-stitch pillow. Since it had four cats and we had four cats, and there was a certain basic correspondence between the looks of these four, I decided to make it over in our cats’ images.

And I put a lot of work into it – twenty years ago or more.

As much work as I put into it, there is a lot left. I never did figure out good colors for Tabitha (the unfinished grey and tan cat) – she wasn’t as high contrast as that stitching. And at this point the discoloration of the fabric and white thread may be permanent.

I used the pattern for O.D., the calico, in another setting already, and I’ll save what I have for the other three as well. The stitching itself, however – it’s time to let it go.

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(No pun intended.) Three crocheted panels out of cotton yarn, to be joined with broad strips into a large rectangle, backed with another layer for thickness, and bordered all around to finish. They are in order of creation, left to right.

I had a few ideas that would have made a patterned mat, stripes and ridges and so forth, but when I tried them out I didn’t really care for them. Then I made the little cream-colored square with the spiral ridge, and thought, why not freeform?

I’m not sure I’d really done any freeform crochet before this. It was an interesting challenge. My thought with the first panel was to add L-shaped regions around the starting square until it became whole-bath-mat-sized, but that became boring and I struck out in a new direction for fun. With the later panels the challenge was thinking of things to do that were different. When truly stuck I would try to come up with the most disruptive thing I could do, in terms of the flow of stitching. Then trying to smooth things out again would prompt creative crochet.

Oh, and incidentally, I way overbought for this project. I looked at bathmat patterns on Ravelry to see how much yarn they typically used, and ended up purchasing 5 skeins of the cream and 3 of each of the three other colors. The three panels pictured took far less than a single skein of each!

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Clue 1: Beginning of center medallion in dark purple, 12 dark gray popcorn grannies, two dark purple old rose hexagons.

I won’t lie, the beginning of the medallion was a little dull. This whole afghan has endless front post double crochet stitches. Fortunately I’m not in the crowd who were discussing having to space them out because of wrist pain. I’m not sure whether I’d ever made popcorn stitches before, but I’m pretty certain even if so I never made them for anything other than practice or experimentation. They have an interesting slightly pointed texture.

Clue 2: Two dark purple solid hexagons, four spiral hexagons in dark purple and either light purple or dark gray, two round ripple blocks in light purple and light gray, 10 light purple front post grannies.

I like spirals. However, the round ripple blocks might be my favorite motif of the entire afghan, though that may be primarily because of how the two light shades look together. In the photo, note that the solid purple hexagon on the right is upside-down and the one on top of the large motif is right-side-up. I got confused, probably in part because of the old rose hexagons of Clue 1.

Clue 3: Four light purple scallops blocks (the only motif worked in rows), two dark purple sun rays hexagons (I found these visually indistinguishable from the solid hexagons and may not have split them up correctly for assembly), four two-color hexagons in dark purple and either light purple or light gray.

The scallops were a nice diversion from all the rounds, and I like their look. Keeping my place in the four-row repeated pattern took occasional orienteering, though. I appreciate that JulieAnny spread out the smaller motifs so every clue had something to give you a break from the big motifs.

Clue 4: Middle of center medallion in dark and light purple, 12 light gray window pane grannies.

The window pane grannies were quite open, with first-round cluster stitches further condensed by third-round post stitches made on them. The middle of the medallion was tricky but interesting. I had to pull a decent amount of yarn out and redo sections. As painful as that was, I figured I shouldn’t spend as much time on this as I am and then let obvious errors go unfixed. It doesn’t make sense.

Clue 5: End of center medallion in light purple, 10 light purple front post grannies.

The end of the center medallion was no more interesting than the beginning, but at least the scenery was better. It was probably one of the largest single items I had worked on to date (well, I mended an afghan for my mother-in-law once, which I don’t think I showed here, and that clearly was larger). Front post grannies, well, are front post grannies.

Clue 7: Brick squares in light and dark purple, 8 dark purple old rose grannies.

The old rose grannies were nice, and indeed, the centermost rounds were identical to the old rose hexagons. The brick squares were the most frustrating and least satisfying motif of the entire afghan. After consistently failing to maintain anything approaching normal tension with 5 yarn overs and a hook insertion five rounds below, I made the tall stitches by yarning over once and pulling four loops up through strands of stitches in the four intervening rounds. It was still fussy and slow, and I’m still not thrilled, but my tension was much more reliable and I can hope that joining straightens them out.

If you want to follow along and get sneak peeks, I’ve kept ridiculously detailed notes on my Ravelry project page (Ravelry login required, I expect), and it’s one of only a few projects I’ve put on Rav as a work in progress. The previous ones were probably all from before I started this blog.

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This segment had the fun Piermont-Haverhill puzzle piece border.

Just the bottom 10 (and a half) towns left!

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This time I sewed a little casing into the bottom of the fabric before washing it. I used warm water and dish soap instead of laundry soap to be sure to cut through any oils from my fingers. When I hung it to dry (via large binder clips around the top of a metal deck chair) I slid a dowel into the casing for weight and even stretch. I think that helped get more of the embroidery hoop marks out, compared to the previous update. The dowel came in handy later as well – rain was threatening, so after the fabric was mostly dry I brought it in and hung it between two chairs inside via the protruding ends of the dowel.

Onward and upward! Well, some upward, but more rightward and then downward. You’ll see this again at the 3/4 mark, in a month or so.

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I had to rip and re-stitch part of Pomfret, where I accidentally stitched over 3 strands at some point and couldn’t disguise the problem. I actually hemmed and hawed so much about whether to redo it that I finished stitching the whole town, but concluded that it would be silly to spend so much time on this project (it’s at least an hour per town for me) only to leave in an error that really was plenty obvious. Fortunately I was able to take out the bad part without disturbing too much of the rest, and still have enough loose thread to re-secure the ends.

Before taking the photo above I washed the fabric. I’ve had problems in the past with long-term projects becoming irrecoverably grungy, so I plan to wash this every time I’ve finished enough to give another update.

Remember that you can make your own map or hijack the filling patterns for other purposes by visiting Upper Valley Fiber Crafts.

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Since I have a lot of crafts with near-term deadlines, I didn’t do any hand embroidery this round. There will be plenty more of that, but I wanted to get something completed without spending several days on it. Hence, more machine embroidery. This time I colored the page before doing the stitching, and made the page pastel and the stitching black, like scratch-off coloring pages that are black over colors. I also switched from regular zigzag to a special diamond-shaped zigzag.

That was actually the underside while I was stitching. You can tell the kind of thread I had in the needle: copper metallic. Metallic thread is hateful stuff, but I am continually drawn to it despite that. Here’s the upper side:

I worked it out and if the cover is included, I have to do a page a week from now on to finish the book on time. I’m not going to do exactly that; I’ll leave more for Thanksgiving and winter breaks. However, it was a boot to the rear to see those numbers! Starting in late November you can expect sketchbook updates to come slightly more than monthly.

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I did a little more than what I’m about to show you, but did not complete any other pages. The one I finished, front and back, was the first page of the book:

I should be getting my sewing machine back from the shop tomorrow, so I’ll have it to try out per melydia’s suggestion.

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One of my favorite books as a child was We Were Tired of Living in a House, written by Liesel Moak Skorpen and illustrated by Doris Burn. The children try living in a tree, on a raft, and by the seashore, collecting an object from each but moving on when nature makes it impossible to stay. Burn’s illustrations are gorgeous, by turns excited, silly, and wistful, and full of detail. It was difficult to find one that was manageable for my project. Here is what I ended with:

Of course as I write this I am traveling, so I cannot fulfill my promise of telling you all the planned embroideries and appliques for the Children’s Book Quilt. However, I have images on wash-away paper and fabric selected for two (having decided after all to find a different Moomin picture): Sylvester and the Magic Pebble and Harold and the Purple Crayon.

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