The Big Happy

Anyone who reads this blog knows I love crochet.  I dabble in many crafty creative things but over the last year or so crochet has really come to the fore as my craft of choice.

I love doing it, I love seeing other people's pictures of what they are doing, I love learning new patterns and stitches.  I love the old fashioned simplicity of it.  I love that I use my great grandmother's darning needle to sew crochet squares together like she would have done.

So I hatched a plan.  If crochet makes me happy then crochet can help me out of the post-natal depression.  I'm not keen on taking the route of medication right now, especially as I am still desperately persevering with breastfeeding, so anything that can help is worth a try.

The next pattern in the Happy Hooker Backwards project is for an iPod cover. I had been rather looking forward to this as it presented a bit of a challenge, given that iPods have evolved somewhat since the pattern was written, so I would have to modify it and work out my own pattern for covering an iPhone instead.  However in my current baby focused, brain-adled state there is no way I would be able to take this on.  So this is on hold until I regain my mind.

Instead I decided I needed a Big Project.  Something huge yet simple.  Something that will take me a lonnnnnng time to do without taxing me too much.  Something that can be started now in the depths of my depression and finished many months from now by the happy recovered Me of the future.

Introducing the Big Happy...

This is going to be a mahoosive blanket.  It measures 2.7m wide...quite accidentally, I didn't plan it, I just hooked the foundation chain until it seemed long enough, oops.  It is a Granny Stripe blanket, a pattern from the endlessly delightful and colourful Attic24 blog.  Simple rows of double crochet (I work in US terms) clusters, endless rows of the same stitch in different colours.  The colours will be random.  This blanket is all about Not Thinking, just doing, just occupying my hands and creating colourful row upon row of soft and delicious stripes.  Something I can pick up to work on in any free minute I may find.  Until one day, months from now, it will be finished and I will look back on each row and remember the days and weeks and months I worked through to get to the end point. 

It will be my Big Happy blanket.

When it is complete I will be happy, I will be Me again.