I haven’t been here in a while, but that doesn’t mean that me and my crochet hook haven’t been busy.

Early last year I decided to crochet and afghan for my son. I’d already crocheted things for my husband, daughter, son-in-law, the baby girl in our family and just about everybody else around me. I didn’t think my son would want something crocheted from old Mom, but he said that something to throw across the back of his sofa might be nice.

So I went on Pinterest and looked for crochet patterns of things he’s interested in. And found a graphgan done with the design of nine houses from the Game of Thrones. No big deal, I thought. I’ve crocheted a lot, and it was only single crochet. Boy was I wrong.

A graphgan is done using a tapestry crochet technique, where colors are carried behind others. You’re literally crocheting over a strand of a different color, until you get to its point in the row you’re working on, then you switch colors and crochet over the other color. At points, I was crocheting over 2 different colors.

It was a long learning process and a longer creating process, literally months in the making. But I finally did it, and here it is:

We helped my son hang it on the wall–he decided it is too nice to throw over the sofa back.

Oh, and I also crocheted an Elmo for babygirl. Another pattern I found online, and so big that when I sat him in a dining room chair, his bulgy eyes peeped over the table top. I crocheted him a little scarf so he wouldn’t get cold as he was sent up to Baltimore recently.

Right now I’m working on a Tom Baker (Dr. Who) scarf for my British friend. It’s supposedly something like ten feet long which I initially worried about, but when I remembered that I had a graphgan under my crochet belt, I knew I could get it done in a reasonable amount of time.

After the Dr. Who scarf is done, the crochet hook will be set aside for the season and the pastels will be taken up, as I go back to trying to illustrate my children’s book that I call The Big Mean Cat.

I’ll be posting my efforts here, so you’ll get to see how that goes!