All last week

Besides being sick, this is what I spent my time doing last week:

Months ago, my daughter had picked out some yarn (TLC wiggles in cherry, which is a true hot pink color, even though these pictures make it look a bit orangey), and asked me to make her a poncho out of it. I've had so many other projects that I wanted to do that I kept putting it off. But, with her birthday being this last Saturday, I put everything aside and worked on it, and only it, all last week.

I started with this pattern, but since the yarn I was using (and the hook I was using... I couldn't find the one called for in the pattern) did not give me the same gauge, I just tried to make it to the dimensions (after all, it's just 2 rectangles... nothing really fancy). I crocheted a chain that looked to me to be about 13" (I was comparing it to the long side of an 8.5"x11" piece of paper), but after I had crocheted back into the foundation chain, it stretched a bit, and ended up being 14.5" long. I hate crocheting into the foundation chain, so instead of ripping back, I just figured I'd work with it. In the pattern, the length of the rectangles was roughly double that of the width, so I made my rectangles a bit longer, and then seamed it all up. It took me much longer to do than I had anticipated, and I was seaming and weaving in ends (with a smaller crochet hook... because, of course, I couldn't find my darning needle when I needed it) after midnight on Friday night, and I didn't have time to add the eyelash yarn trim (I can do that later).

So, anyways... the poncho was larger than I'd originally intended. I figured that would just mean she could wear it longer, but... um... check out how much too big it is:

Oops. I think I can fix it by doing a round or two of double crochet all around the neckline. I may only opt to do the eyelash trim around the neck, as the puppy kept biting at the long corners, and I think the eyelash trim on the bottom would make it even more puppy-appealing.

Trying to do this in one week seriously burned me out. I didn't knit or crochet a thing the whole weekend.