FO Friday: My Little Leo

I'm reaching back a few months with today's FO Friday, to a small project I completed just after Christmas. It was a birthday present for a good friend of mine.

My friend Kate has a very special horse. His name is Leo. He's almost 20, and has had a very checkered history, suffering from several injuries through his career and being almost written off more than once. When Kate met him, he was in very bad shape. Together, they have brought him back to good health, to the point where she has been able to ride him in various competitions. You can read more about them on their Facebook page.

Photo copyright Kate Lee

Isn't he beautiful? He's wearing a disabled badge in his coat because both Leo and Kate are a little wonky. She jokes that between them, they have four working legs.

I got it into my head that I wanted to make her a miniature version of Leo for her birthday. I hunted round Ravelry until I found a pattern that was perfect. It's a free pattern called My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic School Age Ponies by Knit One Awe Some. I thought I had enough yarn in my stash for it, but ended up buying more as I didn't quite have as much as I thought.

I customised the pattern a little bit, to match as closely as I could to Leo's colouring. It's Hobbycraft's own brand value DK black yarn, and Sirdar Country Style DK for the brown, which makes him an interesting mix of acrylic and wool. I had a lot of fun with the mane and tail, but my favourite part has to be the felt pieces I attached afterwards. The eyes are cute enough, but in order to make My Little Leo as close to the original as possible, I cut out a felt disabled sign to sew to his bum.

Not pictured is the little red felt saddle I made, with the name Leo embroidered (probably quite badly) across the top. By the time I finished that I was in quite a rush to get the horse into the parcel and send it off to Kate! But you can kind of see it in the photo below, when My Little Leo met his namesake for the first time.

Photo copyright Kate Lee

Before you dash off to Tami's to read another few FO Friday posts, I do wonder if I can ask you a quick favour. Kate is currently in the middle of a fundraising attempt, which will either get her enough cash to sort out her new saddle, or at the very least help fund training and transport costs as she and Leo pursue a new para-equestrian career in endurance riding. I'm not asking you for money, but just a couple of minutes of your time. You see, Kate is a contender for this month's Mars Milk Sports Fund, and if she wins the public vote she will be awarded a prize of £1,000! All it takes is to click on THIS LINK, read Kate's story in her own words, then click the big blue vote button and enter your email address. In order for your vote to count, you do then have to open the email Mars will send you and click on the link in it to verify your vote. If you don't do that, your vote won't count. Sadly, only one vote per email address (otherwise I'd have been sat here for days repeatedly voting for her).

Kate would love you all forever if you did her this teeny tiny favour! You can follow her and Leo's journey by liking their Facebook page, or by following them on Twitter @FourGoodLegs.

Squares on a Sunday

Not likely to be a regular feature for me, as I don't currently have plans for a square-intensive project. Not being a sock-knitter, I don't have sock yarn scraps hanging around!

However, I have recently been crocheting squares for two very different charitable efforts.

First up is the International Women's Day 100 Million Stitches project. I found this project almost a month ago and have been making squares in amongst my other projects. I have made a total of six squares, mostly taken from Jan Eaton's 200 Crochet Blocks book.

The second orange block is the newest, which I started yesterday afternoon and finished off this morning. I am going to send these six squares off to Glasgow tomorrow.

Just last week, I came across a second square-related project: Sarah London's Crochet a Rainbow. I'll be honest, and say that making squares to be turned into colourful blankets for the flood victims tugged on a lot more heartstrings than the 100 million stitches "missing women" feminist angle. So I've done a fair few more squares for this one. Fifteen, so far.

A variety of plain and multi-coloured, along the rainbow theme. I have stopped on these for now, because they were getting dull (and I hate weaving in all those ends!), but as the project is ongoing with no real deadline, I may well come back to it at some point in a few weeks when other projects are over.

So there's my squares for Sunday. Head on over to Halfpint's blog to (hopefully) link up with other square enthusiasts!

More charity crocheting

Just the other day, I read a post on the Crocheting the Day Away blog, about a charity project based in Australia. The project is called Crochet a Rainbow, and is being organised by Sarah London. The idea behind the project is to make blankets/throws in bright, rainbow shades to donate to those affected by the recent flooding in Queensland.

I immediately decided I should take part, and have diverted yarn from the ongoing granny rectangle to make bright grannies for sending to Oz.

As it happened, the colours of acrylic I have form a perfect rainbow! Red, Orange, Yellow, Green, Blue and Purple. So far I've done 11 (although I am yet to weave in my ends, so they're not completely finished with), but will try to do more before sending them across.

It doesn't take much time to whip up a few five-round grannies, so I heartily recommend everyone picks up a hook and gets crocheting for such a good cause.

Progress Report

Another week, another WIP Wednesday post.

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First up: the Tiramisu Baby Blanket. I have been working on this, on and off, all week, and it's now a rather impressive 21" (still a way to go to 32!).

It's quite a dull project at the moment, I get fed up of just doing the same stitch over and over in rows. I much prefer crocheting in the round, I think. But I can see the end is near, and I'll be on the border before I know it.

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I haven't progressed much on the Granny Rectangle in terms of size, but what I have done this week is weave in all my ends. I'd been getting quite wary of the fact that when I finished the blanket I'd still have to weave in hundreds of bits of yarn, so I figured I get a head start.

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I've done more squares for 100 million stitches (who, I discovered today, have a group on Ravelry).

Top left: Friendship Ring Square

Top right: #16 Waterlily from 200 Crochet Blocks

Bottom left: #41 Bobble Triangle from 200 Crochet Blocks

Bottom right: #48 Danish Square from 200 Crochet Blocks

All made from the Sirdar Bonus DK I'm using on the Granny Rectangle. I quite enjoyed the bobble square, despite being worked in rows. I like how it's turned out. The Waterlilly was a bit awkward, I don't think the pattern is written very clearly. But as I'd done flowers just like it for my Afghan Reincarnation cushions, I kind of knew what I was doing. The Danish square comes out wonky. I guess blocking would fix that, but as I'm just sending this off to be sewn into a large blanket, I don't think its worth bothering.

I think the main issue I've been having with these blocks, is that Jan Eaton's book is the British edition, so all the crochet terms are the British terms. I learned to crochet from the Stitch 'n' Bitch Happy Hooker book, so I learned American style. Once you get into the swing of it, it becomes second nature to read a British pattern, but it makes my head hurt at first.

Annoyingly, when I think about why Americans would say single crochet when Brits say double crochet, they both make sense. Single, because you only pull through the loops once. Double, because you yarn over twice. It would be so much easier though, if people publishing patterns said quite clearly at the top "I am using American/British crochet terms". It would save on squinting at pictures and thinking "is that a sc or a dc?"; my talent for identifying crochet stitches on sight is not yet fully developed!

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And finally, before I sign off, here's a rather exciting sneak peek at something soon to appear in an FO Friday:

Yes! I finally conquered the fins! Clown Fish is a go! More details on that when I post the FO.

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That's me done for WIPs this week. Head on over to see more at Tami's Amis.

WIP Wednesday, sort of

So as I mentioned yesterday, I'm crocheting squares for the 100 million stitches project. True to my word, when I got home from work last night I pulled out the yarn I've been using on my granny rectangle, and made my first block, the friendship ring motif I mentioned yesterday.

I'm going to count the 100 million stitches project as one WIP, so although the individual square is finished, the project is ongoing; therefore, by the virtue of tenuous logic, I include it here as a WIP Wednesday, and am not saving it for Friday's FO post!

The picture's not great, but you can see it well enough. Purple and red were my colours of choice for the interlocking rings (and boy, were they a pain in the behind to manouevre around) with a pale blue border. It's come out bang on the 6" required, which is awesome.

I popped out at lunchtime, and had a look in Waterstones at crochet books, the end result of which was me ordering Jan Eaton's book 200 crochet blocks from Amazon when I got back to the office (I don't mind waiting a few days to get my hands on it if it costs me half the price!). No boring plain squares for me in this project! Rather handily, all the patterns in the book are for 6" squares as well, so very little brain power will be required.

An update on my other WIPs:

• Clown Fish has not changed since last week. I didn't have a chance to have another look at the fins this week, perhaps I will make time to do that tonight.
• Granny Rectangle is sleeping at the moment, I finished off the round I was halfway through and fastened off because I needed the black for something else (come back on Friday to see why!), and I'm using my only 6mm hook for this and the Tiramisu blanket, so I can only work on one at a time.
• Tiramisu Baby Blanket is progressing nicely, it's almost halfway done on the main fabric area. No photos though, as it's at home and I am not! Plus, it doesn't look all that different to last week.

As usual, head over to Tami's blog to see everyone else's current WIPs.

Charity Crochet

Over the last couple of weeks, I've read about a number of charitable knitting/crochet efforts, most notably SuddenExpression's drive to knit preemie hats for the hospital which cared for her sister's premature twins. I wanted to get involved in something like this, because I think it's a great idea. Unfortunately, all of the ones I've read about so far are based in America, and would involve shipping my FOs to American addresses.

So you can imagine my delight when I discovered today the 100 Million Stitches project being undertaken as part of the celebration of the centenary of International Women's Day. Not only are 6" squares ridiculously quick and easy to crochet up, I can go to town on different motifs. Consider it practice for my next afghan project! And better than that, the project is based in Glasgow, which means a UK address to post the squares to.

I already have a first motif in mind, the Friendship Ring Square by Terri Kroupa (pattern is here, the only shared FO on Ravelry I can find is tealya's joined ring afghan, which I'm sure she won't mind me linking to, as it means my non-Ravelling readers can see how it looks all finished in a blanket). It reckons it's an 8" square, but with some fiddling about on hook size and yarn I'm sure mine will be more like 6". I've been wanting to play with this square for a while, but it didn't really seem to make any sense to just make one and leave it lying around.

I am now very tempted to run out and buy a big book of motif patterns and spend the next week or so working my way through them for this project! Might have to wander into town at lunchtime and see what I can find.