Stitch for Good - A Community Handcrafts Group

This fall I started a handcrafts group in my community - Stitch for Good. We meet once a week, and chat while we work on our projects - crochet, knitting, quilting, anything that's portable that you can do while chatting.

It's amazing how quickly the time goes - a hour and a half goes by before we realize it. And it's really nice to make time to crochet - sometimes when I'm busy I will go for weeks without crocheting at all, so this is a great change. It's also nice to have a community of folks (there are about 4 or 5 of us there each week) to share projects with; you can't always talk to your partner or most of your friends about your crafting, they get tired of it after a while!

Showing off some of our finished squares for the group blanket 

Every few months we are going to choose a project to work on together for a community cause or a charity. For our first project we decided to make a group crochet block blanket, for the local women's shelter. We chose four colours - dark and light blue, green, and purple, in a nice soft yarn (Red Heart Soft). We decided on 3 different patterns from the book 200 Crochet Blocks, and each person worked on a few squares. Some of the knitters in our group even learned to crochet so they could participate in the project.

We had some gauge issues  - to be fair, I'd never paid much attention to gauge before, since my previous project didn't require a specific size of finished product, so I didn't realize how important it was. Here I'd always thought that I crocheted quite tightly, but it turned out that everyone else's tension was much tighter than mine, and so even after everyone moved to larger hooks, and I moved to a smaller hook, we still ended up with a few different sizes of squares! After some agonizing over the issue and rearranging the original pattern, we decided to make a centre section with the larger squares, and then make a wide border around that, and then use the smaller squares to make another row of squares on the outside. I think the new design worked out really well in the end, and is just as lovely as the original pattern. And I finished off the blanket with a crochet border from the book Around the Corner, to pull it all together.

Our Finished Blanket

We've contacted the women's shelter, and I hope to be able to deliver the blanket in the next couple of weeks. I'll try to get a picture of us dropping it off at the shelter, and post it here later. We originally planned for the blanket to be used in one of the common areas of the shelter, but we've since learned that sometimes when they get hand made items, they use them in a silent auction to raise funds for the shelter, so we'll see what they decide is the best use for the blanket.

Overall I'm happy with how this blanket turned out, but it definitely was more complicated than I realized it would be - our next group project will be much simpler!