Why it’s called “crafting”: Flower Afghan
Last night at about 1:30 am I finally finished my daisy flower afghan. I’m quite pleased with the way that it turned out, which is really lovely, because putting that much time and effort into something you felt ambivalent about would be distressing. I was so pleased I actually made a special effort with my photography for the finished project.
This blanket epitomizes for me the nature of crafting: a bit of this, a bit of that and a lot of effort. The patterns are mine and not mine: part flower pattern I found, edited appropriately, part pattern I made up, a multi-colored checkerboard pattern I came up with and some brown and red borders. The end result is only a tiny bit talent – some hand-eye coordination and a bit of visualization. Most of this blanket is just sheer time and effort. I got a lot of practice crocheting.
So how long did it take? Well, it took me about an hour to do each block plus a little, and there are 48 blocks, which means about 52 hours. It took me another 24 hours to do the stitching and borders. Plus a little time when things go wrong or I have to fix mistakes, another 3 hours. I’d say that’s a good but conservative estimate of how long it took to make me, and that means I spent over 100 hours of my life spent making this. I’m quite a bit better at crocheting now.
For the next month or so, you should expect to see a lot of flowers here, this is the beginning. It’s springtime in the Hill Country, which means wildflowers, which is just about as pretty as it gets for me. I’ve always preferred simple field flowers to cultivated ones in almost every case.
So there you go! Nice, eh? I’m very happy it’s finished, and happy it turned out well!
5 Comments
feel free to leave a few words of your own...jennifer — Sun Mar 22, 2009 at 9:02 am (link)It looks really great. You did a wonderful job. Can’t wait to see what’s next.
Jennifer
Melissa — Sun Mar 22, 2009 at 5:32 pm (link)Absolutely gorgeous! Way to go. By the way, where did you take the photos?
