missy42's The Tunisian Rugby Square (original) (raw)

May 1, 2010 Baker’s Dozen’s description:

In this swap you will be placed into groups of 13. Each group member will knit or crochet one 12 inch square per month to send to the member of the month. As the MEMBER OF THE MONTH (MOM), you can choose the weight (fingering, sport, worsted, bulky) and color scheme. Please do not ask for certain brands, or fibers unless allergic.

The Baker’s Dozen is my very first swap, and this is the second 12”x12” square being made for the Eddy Group I was assigned to. For July, 2010, the MoM is christinacoghill. In order to keep the square a surprize, I won’t be posting any further information until I confirm that christinacoghill has received it. Heck, it may not even be a crochet project!

July 30, 2010 For the July, 2010 MoM, christinacoghill was planning on piecing her squares together and giving them to local animal shelters. Which makes her a much better person than me - I’m planning on keeping all my squares for myself! Anyway, because she was giving the blankets to charity, she didn’t have many specifications.

I decided to use some Cotton-Ease that I had leftover from a previous project. It’s 50/50 cotton and acrylic, which makes it easy to wash, but will allow the fiber to breathe. I don’t know about cats, but I know that dogs at least are colour-blind, so they wouldn’t care what colours I used, but I thought some contrasting stripes might make it a little more interesting for the animal. Or maybe not, I’m not sure if they actually care. The stripes at least made it a little more interesting for me to work on it.

For the stitch, it had to be something an animal couldn’t easily tear up, but I wanted it to have a little bit of texture, as well. So I decided on a Tunisian Simple Stitch/Tunisian Purl Stitch combination. It has a nice, solid weave, lies nice and flat and I love the look of it. Unfortunately, this stitch also tends to be a little bit stretchy, so every time I measured it, it seemed to come out a different size! I added a single crochet border in Lime, in the hopes that it would stabalize the shape a bit more. It helped, but it still came out odd dimentions; closer to 12.25”x13” even after blocking. Hopefully, christinacoghill will still be able to work with it.

In the end, I think it came out looking a bit like a rugby uniform out of a Land’s End catalogue. Wasn’t quite what I was going for, but there you have it.

♥