Makings - Crochet Christmas Character Afghan Progress

Well it seems like October has flown by as fast as the later months of the year tend to.

 

Hasn't the weather been beautiful?

 

I think our September and October weather has more than made up for the awful summer weather. It still remains mild with us and although it isn't sunny every day, most days I have been able to sit out in the garden for a little time while Fraser plays around outside. Without a jacket! Although I have resorted to snuggling up with my lovely Nordic Shawl sometimes. I think I must have looked quite the granny on Friday afternoon when my husband came home from work a little earlier than usual to find me sitting out in the back garden, shawl round my shoulders and working on my crochet!

 

Since I last had a chance to post on here we have spent a lovely week away on holiday in Argyll, on the west coast of Scotland. It's where my husband was brought up and so he always maintains that it is the most beautiful part of the country! We stayed in a little log cabin by the shores of Loch Awe and, like I said, the weather was beautiful. We were able to eat outdoors most days, the boys spent hours throwing stones into the loch, and we had a camp fire in the fire pit beside our cabin most nights with toasted marshmallows and our first ever s'mores!

Our cabin also had no dishwasher, washing machine or wifi and since it was in the middle of the countryside there was no 3G coverage either so we really were able to unplug from everything. I think that's why I've been offline for so long. I've just been gradually getting back online and trying to spend as little time online as possible but rather continue enjoying this beautiful time of year.

 

Of course the other reason that I could have remained offline for so long is that it took me so long to catch up on all the washing and ironing that we returned from our holiday with!

 

The other main thing that has happened since I last posted is that this little man turned two.

 

 

That was him dressing up at a power station we visited on holiday. Cuteness overload!

 

In my head I've been thinking of him as 2 for some months now. He just seems to have been more like a 2 year old in his understanding of what's going on around him and just how, well, sensible I suppose, he is. I'm sure it comes of having older brothers to follow.

 

He understands everything we say to him, in both Gaelic and English, and he has quite a few words, although at this stage they are still probably only recognisable to us as a family and someone else wouldn't really make sense of them. Like, his word for Calum is 'Awa' and David is 'day-day', which isn't too far out as David calls himself Dave Dave to Fraser. I would say that more of his words are Gaelic than English at the moment, which was true of the other boys at this age too and makes sense given that he spends all day with me. I have heard many people say that boys take longer to talk than girls, and I also think that with our boys being bi-lingual they take a little longer to talk properly but the plus of that is that when they do start coming out with words and sentences they have twice as many as children who only speak one language!

 

Isn't language development so interesting? Actually all child development is!

 

Anyway, moving on to the actual title of this post, my Christmas Character Afghan, inspired by Repeat Crafter Me.

 

While we were away on holiday I was able to complete two more squares, rudolf and frosty. That takes my total up to five now. With four to go.

 

 

 

 

 

I was chatting to the lady who runs the lovely little independent yarn shop near the boys' school recently and she too is making the blanket. I've never timed how long it takes to make a square but she reckoned it takes about 4-5 hours of work for one square. I'm lucky to get half an hour straight to crochet so you can see it's a long term project.

 

I haven't quite decided if I am going to make the rest of the squares as characters or make plain coloured squares to alternate with the characters I have done so far. Plain squares will work up much quicker than all the colour changes, the yarn twisting and untwisting and graph reading so I might go for that option.

 

I think, though, that I'm going to try and do a few more characters as they are just so cute!

 

And I think that's us all up to date now. Has everyone else been enjoying such a beautiful Autumn as us? And what about the rumours of a bad winter ahead? Who is looking forward to the alleged heavy snow? *puts hand up* :)