Ice cream for the Dogs

I am working on two blankets for a local charity, Canines vs Cancer (a Washington Basset Rescue Event). Proceeds benefit the American Childhood Cancer Organization Inland Northwest, shelters, rescues & WSU Veterinary Hospital and the best part – ALL money stays LOCAL.  The blankets are the same pattern, but in different colors. I’m giving them luscious ice cream names because what dog doesn’t like ice cream? I’m calling them the Cherry Garcia Blanket and the Hot Chocolate Bliss Blanket. The pattern is Checkerboard Textures Throw and it is a CAL (crochet a-long) through the Red Heart blog.

Hot Chocolate Bliss

I started out thinking this blanket would be perfect for all the leftover yarn I had in my stash. I found this very pretty, pink and brown camo yarn, called Cherry Chip Mocha by Red Heart, that looked promising. Indeed, the square came out beautifully. But, after the first square and a frantic search I realized I simply didn’t have any more of it. Argg!

So I started with a brown camo yarn, called Shaded Browns, and made squares of that. Guess what. I ran out of that yarn too!   How frustrating! A quick search of my neighboring yarn stores revealed no one carried it anymore. In fact, if I wanted to finish using these colors I was going to have to order yarn online.  While I’m not opposed to ordering online, it doesn’t fulfill my need to craft NOW.  So, last night I went in search of yarn I could use, mostly in the hopes the stores much farther away would carry the yarn I needed.  Good news, they did! Bad news, they were out of every color I needed. Double drat!

I made the hard decision to abandon the Cherry Chip Mocha yarn with its single square, and pick a different pink yarn combo.  Enter the Cherry Garcia blanket (and my decision to make ice cream).  As you know, that’s not really what the yarn (either of them) is called. The pink and brown mix is actually called Sweet Mocha and the solid pink is Hot Rose, neither of which sounded appealing to me. Thus the  rename. (To be honest, Shaded Browns wasn’t very appealing either, so that one became Hot Chocolate Bliss.)

Cherry Garcia Blanket

I’ll work on Cherry Garcia while I wait for the rest of my online order of Shaded Browns to come in. Fortunately, the squares using that yarn are the granny square fillers. The single, fancy squares I still have plenty of the beautiful, dark mocha brown to work with.

What’s on your hook/needles? You could always join me in the CAL.