Today's Events & The Edge Of Glastonbury

Last night I stayed up a bit stupidly late and made a lot of progress! I’m sure that many people my age would have been out enjoying themselves in a bar or restaurant, but I don’t know anyone up here and am husband-free at the moment (he is away with work over the weekend as well as during the week right now – and he’ll abroad again soon…) so my evening was spent with the Glastonbury Blanket…

Last night I finished off all of the Turquoise squaring of the circles, and crocheted them all together ready for adding to the rest of the blanket. This was pretty fiddly as by mistake I joined 2 rows of 8 squares together, when I should have first joined 8 rows of 2… This meant that in order to have the crochet ridges from this section matching with the main bit of blanket (i.e. all vertical ridges passing over all horizontal ridges), I had to pass the yarn under the previous join rather than simply travelling over it. This is far more fiddly than it sounds – I definitely recommend double-checking which way you’re going first if you ever have to add another panel of squares onto an existing one! Another fiddly task was that when I sewed in the ends from along the edge that was joining the main blanket, I had to sew up carefully in order to close the little gap that was left by the crochet joining not being continuous.

Still, while fiddly, both of these jobs were well worth the extra effort as now that they’re done you really can’t tell that the blanket was made in 2 sections. And also I have learned my lesson not to be so impatient in future!!

I had previously begun the blanket edge while I was dithering about whether or not to make the blanket square, so once the crocheting together was completed I finished off this round too (you can see how I ended up staying up stupidly late!!). I began my edge with a round of Turquoise granny clusters (3 UK Trebles into each chain-1 space, followed by a chain-1 – or chain-2 in the corners). When I got to the point where 2 squares were joined, I modified this slightly in order to treat the 2 corners as 1 space (I didn’t want to end up with another ruffly edge like on my Safi Baby Blanket!). At first I tried this by putting 2 of the trebles in one corner space, then the final treble into the second corner space. This didn’t look very neat though, so I modified it a bit to use the treble decrease stitch from the neat ripple pattern, with half the stitch in each corner. 

Thinking about it, I must have been tired if I took me so long to figure this out - as I’m writing this I have realised that I have already used this technique on the first panel of my Mum’s flower blanket! Bunny Mummy has an excellent tutorial for this on her blog here :)  

The (not terribly good) arrow is pointing to the modified Granny cluster

Well that brings us to today. Today has been gloriously sunny and hot, and perfect for the village fayre that took place today!

I went and joined my mother-in-law, who had a small stand there. Normally she would take woolly crafty things along, and sit spinning as a demonstration. This year however she fancied a change, and she has spent the last few days baking like crazy to test different versions of cookie recipes. She then spent more time freshly baking cookies to sell at the event, and making up Kilner-style jars of cookie mix to sell as nice gifts.

I walked down to the fayre to join her. The village had a lot of bunting strung up, but I thought it was a real shame that the bunting wasn’t criss-crossing the street, but rather was draped along the sides. It turns out that the Highways Agency has banned them from stringing bunting over the road – what killjoys! 

Being a rural community, there was a tractor rally as part of the day’s events. I missed this, but I did see one tractor on its way to their meeting point as I was walking to the fayre.

I also saw this lovely music machine, and some lovely cars on the way towards the village hall.

Our cookie stall was in the field behind the village hall, and I thought it looked lovely (although I could have been biased, as I knew how good the cookies tasted…)

I didn’t take many photos as I had taken Glastonbury with me and was working on that while manning the stall, and there were lots of people to talk to too – my mother-in-law is pretty active in the community, so there were many conversations about committees and things, as well as lots of swapping details with other sheep owners about a new shearer who has recently returned from his training in New Zealand. Village life :)

I was also very taken with a lot of the dogs who were there with their owners to participate in the dog show event, I wish I had taken more picture of the dogs as there was everything from a tiny Chihuahua to a great big Deer Hound! My favourite, a 13 week old Welsh Springer puppy called Merlin, won silver in his category :)

So, at the end of a sunny day spent trying not to get sunburnt and trying not to eat all the cookies, the Glastonbury had 3 rounds of Turquoise edging completed. I feel like this is enough turquoise for me to start with my fancy edging plan, so I have begun this and will share when I know if it’s going to work or not…

For now though, please take a look at poor, sad, rectangular Glastonbury:

And now look at lovely, perky, square Glastonbury! See how much happier it looks now? Worth that extra effort I think :)