Cat Mad Crochet

Estimated reading time: 4 minutes

Another week of madness has passed in my country. I really, really hate living in interesting times. I cannot wait to be on the other side of this little historic interlude. (Please, please let it be a little historic interlude!) May the mid-term elections bring us some relief and sanity. I don’t know how I go about dealing with the rest of humanity now, though. How do you go back to just trusting people when so many of us have shown ourselves to be sadistically cruel monsters? 

I’ve been crocheting through the horrors. It provides a nice break from the doom scrolling, which wins far more than it should. The horrors freaking abound. I like to think of my crochet as a rebellion of its own. I will not shop in your damn economy, orange man. I will create the soft things that I can with yarn from my stash or purchased from very carefully selected vendors allowing me and mine to bask in hating you by not supporting your economic masterplan of, seemingly, driving us into the damn ground. 

Anyway, I made some shit. Let me show you.

This week, for the purposes of the blog, I’m talking about the afghan I started. (Yes, I worked on other projects. We will get to them eventually.) Heating prices are supposed to go up thanks to the big, stupid, reverse Robin Hood bill of death, so I thought perhaps an extra blanket for winter might be nice. You know, to keep the chill of disaster off.

As I have mentioned before, I was making squares for the Big Square Project, but I wasn’t sure if those squares would become a bunch of scarves arranged in different ways or a big afghan. Well, I know now. It’s going to be a big square afghan. I plan it to be between 90 and 120 inches square. Each square is one square inch and made in lace weight yarn. Will this project kill me? Maybe. I can think of many worse ways people are dying right now.

Here is where I stand with it today:

Yes, that’s seven squares of what will be a project with between 8,100 to 14,400 squares. I do not care. There are quilts out there with as many or more pieces, so there can be afghans made with thousands of pieces too. Let the suffering begin. Let it be a labor of love and resistance.

My mood may be deteriorating.

Have you ever noticed that the preppers all talk about having enough beans or rice or water tablets or canned pigs’ feet or whatever they squirrel away, but they never talk about what you really need to survive a nightmare scenario: Resilience. Where do we get that?

Hooks up for a better day, friends. 

Would you like to make these squares too? Perhaps in a less masochistic yarn choice? Here’s what I’m doing:

Chain 5, sl st into the first chain, ch 1

2 sc into ch loop, ch 7, 3 sc into chain loop, ch 7, 3 sc into chain loop, ch 7, 3 sc into chain loop, ch 7, 1 sc into ch loop, sl st into first sc

ch 1, sc into the sc you just sl stitched into, [sc, hdc, 3 dc, hdc, ch 3, hdc, 3 dc, hdc, sc] into each 7 ch loop, work a sc into the middle sc of three from the last round between each ch 7 sp, after last loop, sl st into first sc of round

break the yarn

I like to think I made up this motif pattern. I’m sure there is something similar out there. Whatever. I release it into the world. May its life be long and rich.

Repeat until you have enough motifs to make whatever you are making. I am using a 2.25 mm hook and Malabrigo merino lace weight yarn. I have several bags of odds and ends and full hanks pulled from my stash. Someone will be kept warm someday by this blanket.

I plan to use the scraps and hanks I have amassed to play with colors dancing in and out and over the surface of this afghan. We shall see how that goes. I did decide to join them as I go, though now I have bunch I have to work in as I make more of them, because the idea of sewing together thousands of motifs made me realize I would be leaving this project unfinished in a box for my poor children to find and have to deal with someday, not impossibly, in the far future.