Sunday, July 10, 2005

I have a bunch of red & black donated yarn that I wanted to make into a blanket. I went poking around for a suitable pattern and here’s what I found. I thought this would look great! So, I started to make a motif and what I got was that big hexagon you see to the right.

Yuck! I tried to like it, but I hate it. It’s just big & ugly. The pattern says to use lots of colors, but I really don’t like this at all. I can’t give away something like that. It just disturbs me.

I wanted to keep the hexagon idea & use red & black. I came up with the two smaller hexagons.

Better, huh? It’ll be interesting to look at with the different centers randomly strewn around the blanket. I’ve decided to call them “EYES”. Plus, this is a great way to use up those small balls of yarn just hanging around.

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Wednesday, July 13, 2005

I have a bunch of ‘eyes’ done for the blanket already. They work up really fast. I stitched a few together so you could get a sneak peak at the blanket.

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Thursday, July 21, 2005

I have made 35 eyes for the Eyes Blanket. That’s just over 1/3rd of the eyes I want to make. I’m going to start with about 100 eyes and see how large the blanket will be. I suspect I will be making more than 100 eyes. I may try to locate some hexagon ‘grid’ paper to start mapping out the blanket.

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Monday, July 14, 2008

Three years later, I pick up this project again. About a month after the last update, I went through a divorce, so I needed time (ok a lot of time) to regroup.

Anyway… I have 55 eyes done now. Once I hit 100 eyes, I’ll see how big the blanket is going to be and decide where I’ll go from there – lap blanket or full-size blanket.

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Comments about the eyes blanket from my previous blog…

Denise Says:
July 14th, 2005
Yes, I can see why that large hexagon would bother you. If you look at the center five rounds, it looks like a staring jaundiced blue eye, with hellfire in the pupil.

I’d rip it out and redo it!

Oddly enough, I think large hexagons would work if you made the center rounds black, white, red, (or white, red, black) and continued outward in random colors. At some point, it would look rather like those ojos de dios that so many of us did in summer camp.

But the smaller eyes are charming, and should look quite nice when they’re all stitched together. The honeycomb effect of the black outer edge should form an elegantly dramatic framework for displaying the colors!

Denise Says:
July 21st, 2005
Darn it, Jeanne, now you’ve got me trying to figure this one out.

If you make 103 hexagons, you can create a blanket that is 9 hexes wide (in a sort of wobbly zigzag way), and 11 or 12 hexes high (again, the wobble).

Because hexes are basically (!) fused equilateral triangles, if you take the side as one unit, the “diagonal” (point to point, through the center) will be two units, and the height (center of side to center of side, through the center of the hex) will be the square root of three units.

This means that the blanket I’ve just described would be about 13.5 units wide, by 20 units high.

So if your hexes are about 4 inches high, the blanket would end up roughly 31″ by 46″

I think. In theory. If I haven’t messed up the arithmetic.

Of course, if there is anything I’ve learned from crochet, it’s that crocheted items (even when they are supposed to be nice standard geometric shapes) feel no obligation to conform to plane geometry. They do what they want, when they want. And it all works out somehow, but the measurements can get a bit wonky in the meantime.

(And if you find proper hex grid paper (or a printable image that doesn’t look like unantialiased awfulness), let me know where to get some, please? I was looking for some several years ago, but the closest I could find was some isometric triangle stuff. This would have been okay, except it was a bit more expensive than I wanted. (I was planning on doing a lot of colored pencil test layouts.) Not sure how I worked around it. Or if I ever did. I may have packed that idea in mothballs. At any rate, I would love to have some hex grid paper. Hmmm… I wonder…. A CAD program might work…. Gotta think about this one!)

Jeanne, Queen of the Green Beans Says:
July 21st, 2005
I found a really cool site that generates all kinds of graph papers….

Free Online Graph Paper

This printed very well for me AND you can even choose the size of the squares, hexagons, trapezoids *AND* you can choose the color you want the lines to be. They have other type of paper too! Dots, Iso-dots, and other stuff – lots of fun to play with!

Denise Says:
July 22nd, 2005
Ohhhh…. Cool! I’m bookmarking this one!