Adventures In Crochet Conundrums

A million years ago, back when I first learned to crochet, I crocheted MANY blankets from a free pattern I found on some yarn company’s website.  And I crocheted almost all of them in acrylic yarn.  I of course can no longer remember the company name nor find the pattern, but that doesn’t really matter because I wrote up the instructions (in a clearer manner, if I do say so myself).

So leggy…

I call this pattern the Corner-To-Corner blanket, and it’s really quite clever. It’s all double crochet, so it goes quite fast, but because it’s done on the diagonal and every row slants a different direction from the previous row, it avoids the unattractive “leggy” look that can characterize rows and rows of double crochet.

For this pattern, you will need two main yarn colors and one variegated yarn that includes both your main colors plus at least one color that contrasts with your main colors.  You can get my version of the pattern here.  

The genius of this pattern is that it looks like it starts with one solid color in one corner, and then gradually shades over to the other solid color on the opposite corner.  It’s really a very clever and attractive optical illusion. And did I mention it’s fast?  Oh, and quite easy, once you get the hang of crocheting on the diagonal.  I will mention that the afghan turns out ever-so-slightly diamond shaped, rather than solidly rectangular but it’s a subtle distortion and doesn’t detract from the beauty of the finished product.

As I mentioned above, I crocheted many of these blankets when I was first starting to crochet, and family and friends all ended up with multiple versions.  I have several myself.  It’s always handy to have a stack of afghans you can pile up on a bed during a power outage.  During our family’s Christmas celebration, my favorite brother handed me one of the acrylic blankets I’d made for him (or someone in his family, I can’t remember), which had a big hole in the middle.  I immediately carried it off and set it aside for repair.

I’ve finally gotten around to looking at it, and the tear is in the middle of one of the rows, rather than coming in from an edge.  All the yarn that should have been been in the form of double crochet was still attached.  I figured I should be able to just re-crochet it into place and it would be an easy fix.  Below you can see the hole, and also a section of the same row where the stitches were still intact.  I studied that intact area to make sure I could figure out how to attach everything together.

I’m sorry to have to report that I failed miserably.  I tried multiple times, but for the life of me, I could not figure out how to both crochet the missing section one cluster at a time and attach it to all the still-intact clusters so that it would lay properly.  I’m only including one picture of my multiple attempts, and this was the closest I got to getting it right.  And it is definitely not right.  Perhaps it might have been different if the yarn I was using hadn’t still been attached.

I ultimately abandoned my attempts to use the attached red yarn, dug a skein of pink acrylic yarn out of my stash, and just crocheted the clusters back into place, but only attaching them on one side.

Then I cut another length of the pink yarn, and whip-stitched the new clusters into place against the other side of the gap.  It doesn’t look terrible, except for the section on the far left, where I had to do some extra long stitches to get everything to stay together.  Based on this experience (my first with crochet repair), I am guessing that every crochet project in need of repair would need to be assessed and an individual repair plan created.  I don’t know that there’s one general “method” that would work.  Crochet is just too interlocked and variable. 

It’s done now and it’s going back to my brother.  Hopefully, the repair will hold.  Although I’m too much of a yarn snob these days to routinely use acrylic yarn, I will say that it is long-lasting and sturdy.  I have a pink crocheted blanket that my grandmother made me over 40 years ago. It gets used all the time, and just thrown in the washer/dryer with the rest of my clothing.  And there’s not a hole or loose thread anywhere.  Amazing.