Fun With Yarn

I've been getting back into my crafting over the last few days (especially the last two, while I've been recovering from my first gym session...). Our house is practically overflowing with various balls of yarn, packs that I've picked up at a "bargain" because I was certain I'd be able to come up with something to do with them and random single balls that I bought because I wanted to try something out or they were left over for something, and of course with the yarn comes the half-finished projects. It drives Nick crazy, but then again, most of the space that's not taken up with my stuff is taken up with his Warhammer (Fantasy and 40K) models, paints and suchlike, so I'm pretty sure it balances out.

But I've decided to take a more pro-active approach to my crochet and knitting now, and so I'm trying to set myself a few new rules. The most important of which is that I'm only allowed a maximum of four projects active at any one time - two "short-term" and two "long-term". And connected to that, I'm not allowed to buy more yarn unless I've finished a project (or it's an essential part of a long-term project).

So with that in mind, this is what I'm working on at the moment:

 - Star Lap Blanket. I started this last week while looking for something to do with my hands while Nick and I were marathoning through a TV series. Nick likes to just sit and watch stuff for hours, and while I like watching things with him, I find it a lot more difficult to do so and so I tend to pick up something to knit or crochet while it's going on. In this case my eyes came to rest on some random balls of cotton-mix yarn that I'd had for a while but didn't have anything specific in mind for them, and I remembered a blanket pattern that I'd seen in a recent crochet magazine that I'd liked.

This photo was actually taken a couple of days ago; it's grown a bit since then and I'm hoping to have it finished by early next week. I also know that it's going to be a comfortable blanket, as whenever I put it down one of the cats immediately settles on it and goes to sleep (not pictured: Cracker waiting patiently for her chance on the blanket).

 - Doctor Who Scarf. No photo for this yet, as I'm not very far into it at all. Nick asked for this - well, he's wanted me to make him a scarf for a while, and when I found a site (Doctor Who Scarf.com) that had patterns for the Tom Baker scarves I pretty much knew I had to make one for him. He did get me my Chromebook, after all, which buys him so many boyfriend points. I also let him choose the colours, so his scarf is going to be dark/bottle green, grey and black. So like the Doctor if he got sorted into Slytherin.

 - Beekeeper's Quilt. This is one of my "long-term" projects, because I can't see myself getting this one completed any time soon. I saw it on Ravelry a while back and thought it was beautiful, but having to do it on dpns put me off, because I've never worked with them before. Yesterday though I decided that I should at least try to learn how to knit with dpns and so took the plunge.

...I still haven't managed to get it right yet. Thankfully for the meantime, there's also a crochet version that uses front post crochet - which coincidentally I've also never tried before - and so I've at least managed to learn one new skill today.

This is my first hexapuff, done in crochet. Surprisingly easy to do, once I'd gotten the front post crochet down. One down, a couple of hundred to go...