Crochet Bath Mat # 2 and "Easy Summer Living" Bag Giveaway Winners

My second crocheted bath mat has hit the floor! Took a bit longer to complete than I expected because when sewing the daisy hexagons together I discovered one or two rogue hexies with eleven petals instead of twelve. "Would anyone notice?", I asked myself."No, they wouldn't." But of course I had noticed and so I would in future notice; in fact every time I looked at it my eye was inexorably drawn to the offending missing petals. So with a certain amount of cursing, huffing and puffing I made myself unpick and redo the ones that were not quite right. If you spot any others that I haven't yet noticed, please don't tell me or I will have to redo those as well!

In the course of the unpicking, I also managed to snip the back of a perfectly good petal stitch which led to a bit of blue smoke and a lot of heated expletives. The one big downside of crochet as compared to knitting, I realise, is that it is virtually impossible to effect a repair of a damaged stitch unobtrusively. After my initial panic at realising what I'd done, I did however manage to pull the snipped ends through just enough to tie a new piece of yarn onto each end, thereby joining them together again, but it was touch and go. The join is on the back and doesn't show, I think, but it's a lesson to be a bit less scissor-happy in future!

Anyone else have any tips on repairing crochet without simply unravelling it and recrocheting? It occurs to me, for example, that, were any unwelcome moths to take a fancy to my blankets, any holes would be extraordinarily difficult to mend. Not too disastrous perhaps in a blanket made up of small, individual units, such as squares or hexagons, as the unit could be carefully cut out and redone, but fairly calamitous in a continuous piece of fabric such as my Sea-Ripple, which is fast reaching the finish line. I hope my cotton blankets are safer but it may be a good reason to stick to yarn not favoured by pesky moth larvae!

Anyway leaving aside such apocalyptic thoughts, I am very happy with my hexie daisy bath mat. Someone asked if I use any kind of backing for these. I don't and have found they are fine on their own but you could always sew on something non-slip if you wanted to. The nice thing about using cotton though, is that when damp, it's quite grippy anyway.

I have made my bath mat with a few more hexagons than the pattern in Sue's book (each of my rows has one more hexagon in it than the original pattern). This was to compensate for the fact that I was using a single strand of cotton yarn on its own, as opposed to a strand of cotton yarn and a strand of an acrylic together, so my hexagons came out a little bit smaller than Sue's. It's still quite compact which I really like - big enough to be practical to use, but not so big as to take ages to dry or, more significantly, to become too heavy when wet - this does not reflect a concern for the comfort of post-shower feet so much as a concern for my crochet becoming distorted! Priorities, people!

As with my first patchwork, Granny Square sampler, bath mat, I used a 4.5 mm hook and Rico Creative Cotton from my post-blanket stash, although alarmingly (or encouragingly, depending on how you look at it!), the stash pile doesn't seem to have diminished in size much!

Now on to the winners of my "Easy Summer Living" Bag giveaway. Thank you all so much for your lovely comments on them. Sorry, I haven't got enough to give a bag to all of you who wanted one. But if you haven't won one and want one, do give the pattern a go - it's really easy. And if you do hit any snags with the pattern or the instructions aren't clear, feel free to email me and I'll do my best to help.

The three winners, pulled, this time, in the old fashioned way, from a hooky hat, (well, a hooky bowl actually), are:

Elisa

MagsD

and Caroline Saunders

so if you could email me your postal addresses I will pop them in the post to you asap. (You can find my email address at the top of this page under the Contact Me tab.) I hope you enjoy using your bags and that we finally get some summery weather to fit their theme!

E x