Bad Pictures of a Recent Project

But before we get to that -

I have a slight obsession with these:

And I will usually have two or three (five is 200 calories, so 40 calories each) after lunch at work. And y'all know that Dove is famous for their little affirmations or sayings that are printed on the inside of the wrapper. You know, they usually say things that aim at getting you to slow down and indulge in a "moment" or whatever.

However, I have noticed two recently that really kind of irk me. One that says "Chocolate Loves Unconditionally", and this one that I just unwrapped today:

Really, the "Chocolate Loves Unconditionally" one is the one I have a major problem with. I could totally be a Debbie Downer who thinks too much about this stuff, but when obesity is such a problem in this country, and when eating disorders so often center around emotional needs, it seems so irresponsible for a chocolate company to feed into that with these "comforting" messages of love by chocolate. Chocolate does NOT love unconditionally. Chocolate doesn't love at all. And an overweight person who is dealing with their emotions by way of comfort food is probably going to read that and go, 'Aww....chocolate loves me. I should eat more of it because it makes me feel good!" While they're not addressing their emotional issues at all.

I don't know. It just bugs me.

But on to my project that has been taking up all my time for the past couple of months. My friend Tonja is pregnant with her second baby (another girl!) and The BFF threw her a shower this weekend. I decided a couple months ago, because I apparently didn't learn my Christmas Dish Cloths lesson and I'm an idiot who is a glutton for punishment, that I would crochet her a baby blanket.

Unlike dish cloths, I was not up until 3 am the morning of the shower working on the blanket, amazingly enough. I finished it at 11:30 pm the night before, thankyouverymuch. I wanted to make a ripple/chevron afghan, so I scoured the interwebs to find a simple pattern, and totally scored with an amazing Youtube tutorial for a pattern called "Lazy Waves". If you're a crocheter, the whole thing is nothing but Double Crochet (DC) and Double Crochet Together (DCTog or DC Decrease) stitches. SUPER simple, even I could do it!

Anyway, as I began working on it, I slowly started falling in love with it, even though it was a huge PITA (Pain In The Ass). Even though it was simple, I was using very fine/soft baby yarn, so the stitches were super small and slippery. One row, at the beginning, took me more than 30 minutes to do. There are 82 rows in this blanket. So even when I got a little faster, and each row was taking me about 20 minutes, you're looking at at least 1,640 minutes of work on this afghan. Not to mention all the weaving in of ends I had to do after changing between colors. And if you're curious, like I was, 1,640 minutes is more than 27 hours. Tonja's lucky I like her.

So by the time I was finished and had invested 27 hours of my sweat and tears into this thing, I was kind of sad to see it go. Before I wrapped it up, I took a bunch of pictures of it. But the lighting in my apartment is horrible, so they don't really show how pretty it really was. If you're interested, I used Bernat BabySoft and Softees yarn for this project. I used one whole large skein of hot pink and less than one large skein each of the Burl Gray and White. The final size was probably 2.5 feet by 4 feet-ish. I forgot to measure.

Without any further ado, the bad pictures:

It was a huge hit! Tonja loved it, and the little girls at the shower all wanted to be wrapped up in it at once. It was so worth all the time I put into it, and I hope her baby girl enjoys it! 

For now, though, I have to force myself to not start any more crochet projects because I have so much else going on. And I know that if I did start one, I would totally use it to procrastinate from doing any of the things I really need to be doing...*cough*SCHOOL*cough*. 

What about you guys? What is your go-to procrastination method? Crafts? Books? Hiding under the covers and pretending everything outside the bed doesn't exist? Tell me!