Sidetracked

Part of the reason I'm behind on my quilt is I've been sidetracked by this:

My ripple blanket

I am following Lucy's neat ripple pattern, which she generously shares on her blog Attic24, a beautiful blog full of crochet goodness along with a big dollop of Yorkshire beauty.  

Since I am fairly new to crocheting, I had no yarn stash to bust.  That, combined with limited funds and the fact that I live in Texas (where we just lived through the hottest summer on record), led me to the I Love This Cotton yarn from Hobby Lobby.  This yarn just feels good (much softer than dishcloth yarn) plus it's conveniently accessible to me. I do wish they had a raspberry and a pumpkin color, but I did the best I could, choosing every color I thought would work.

Yarn rather unromantically arranged in a shoebox

While I was thinking about how to arrange the colors, I came across this random stripe generator, which will predetermine your "random" stripes.  It is very addicting, and I spent quite a lot of time there.  But when I actually began to crochet, I realized that a lot of the fun for me was choosing my own color combinations, so I ditched the stripe generator and am just winging it.  I have 16 colors, arranged in a pattern in my shoebox.  When the first round of 16 was completed, I took the yarn out of the box and made a new arrangement for round number 2, which will soon be finished.  It will take at least 3, maybe 4, rounds to get the blanket as big as I want it to be.  Each round will be a little different.

 
The yarn is a worsted weight cotton and I'm using a US size G crochet hook, if anyone needs that info.

The fun part is seeing how the color of the yarn seems to change, depending on what other colors are beside it.  And the yarn in the blanket, crocheted up, looks different than it did on the skein.

The problem is once I discovered all the beautiful crocheted blankets on the internet, I now have a strong desire to make each one.  This, when I had never even known that I needed one before.............. I at least will not start another BLANKET until this one is finished.  However, smaller crochet projects are fair game and some have already been undertaken ;)