It was a slow start to the hooking week this time around -- I didn't pull a single loop until Saturday afternoon. Luckily, it was a relaxing winter weekend, where I treated myself to just staying home for two whole days. After the last of my Christmas making was complete (late Saturday afternoon), I wrapped the rest of the presents and then mostly just sat around and hooked....and watched 'the Big C' (v. awesome show) on Netflix.
In my photo above, you can see my amazing discovery of the weekend. Up until now, I've been keeping the sausage roll off to the right of my frame as I hook....but this weekend I wondered why I hadn't just been sticking it through the centre hole in the back of the frame. Granted it makes the frame more difficult to man-oeuvre, but everything hangs a little better and it's definitely easier to move my work around on the top. When I'm done hooking for the evening, I just lift it off the grippers and let it fall where it may....
I'm feeling on track to have the long side completed before Christmas (my last night for hooking is the 20th)....and my reward will be unrolling it and seeing how it really looks, when I can see the whole centre and not just a sliver.
My so-called colour planning for the border has been very hap-hazard. When I first started, I would just pick and cut wool for the number of squares I was planning to hook that day/night. Now I prefer to plan for a number of squares at once, and find that an old baking sheet makes this task a lot easier. I basically just arrange the piles of cut strips in the same order I plan to hook them. The little odd bits of similar wool that are hooked in together are plucked at the last minute, just as I start hooking a given square, and then all leftover bits are returned to the same bin.
Since I'm just using up all sorts of little and big bits of wool from my shelves and large basket of skinny pieces, I am more or less just planning as I go. And, I'm getting very good at predicting the amount of wool I need to hook 9 square inches! Now when I cut strips from a bigger piece of wool, I cut enough for another square (or two, if that is all that's left)....loosely tie them in a knot and then place them in a basket. I'm hoping that having this basket of little bundles will speed up the hooking on the other long side, in addition to helping spread colours around. In the almost 200 squares that I've hooked so far, there have been few exact repeats.
