My Labor of (L... L...) Love

I have been working for about six months on the same crocheting project. I can't seem to finish it, for some reason. Those of you familiar with quilting/crocheting, it's sort of like a granny square afghan, and it's for a friend of mine who recently had a very adorable baby. Beautiful. But lots of work.

I gave one to my cousin and her daughter for Christmas. This is what that one looked like (see left). They're little turtles (32 of them, each with six different pieces) and lilypads (96 full, 14 half). In the original blanket, which I gave to Kristopher and Andrea when they had Bailey, the lily pads were white and the turtles were all sorts of different colors.

Then, I made a blue and green one that was supposed to be for my cousin Kristy and her husband and new baby, but they moved from a pretty big house into a tiny house, and I don't want to burden them with more stuff than they can reasonably use, so I gave it to our college group at BUMC to auction off. (Oddly, my aunt and uncle ended up winning the bidding on it). But that one was beautiful. It had cream-colored lily pads like this one, then blue and green turtles. Very cute.

Okay, so I'm just going to paste a picture of it so you can see, because I was really excited about that one, too.

After that, I made the pink one, pictured above. And now, I'm working on a very beautiful one with all green lily pads, and brown/cyan turtles. I think this might be the one with the best-looking turtles. (I promise to post a picture when I'm done.)

Each one of those little lily pads takes me about 40 minutes to crochet. The halves take about 20 minutes. The turtles take about an hour each. Then, you sew them together, one row at a time, and then sew each of the rows together, hide all the ends, and edge about four rows around the whole blanket. All in all, it takes about 180 hours to make one blanket. That's over seven days of solid working (if you work 24 hours a day, which, let's face it, no one can). So, spread over about two months (which is usually about how long it takes me to do it when I'm really working on one, it's definitely do-able. Sit down to watch a basketball game, crochet. Watch a movie, crochet. Watch a TV show, crochet. It makes me very productive when I'm watching TV.

But I think this might be the last one I do for a very long time. Because it's consuming. When I'm working on a blanket, I take it with me, everywhere. I pack it all up with me, with all my needles and different colors of yarn and scissors and hooks. And I unpack it wherever I am. And every time I'm doing something idle, I pull it out and work on it.

Don't get me wrong, I love making them! And I really love giving them to people. Julia's daughter, Lizzie, when she opened hers, immediately latched on to it and dragged it around with her. I love that. But I get a little obsessive about it. Like I have to make one for everyone, and they have to be perfect and every one has to be different... etc. So this one will probably be my last one for awhile. But I'm excited to finish it and to share it with my friend and her baby, and for her to have something handmade.

And then, I think I'm sticking with socks for awhile. :-) Or scarves.

So here's my question: What craft have you been doing ever since you can remember that you just love? Or what craft did you previously do that you would love to pick up again?

Oh, and do you have any good sock patterns for crochet? ;-)