Ripples in unexpected place

I thought I'd share the ripple love with the unsuspecting public, so I took a wee ripple down to the river and stitched it to a railing. Now I'm wondering what will happen to it... all alone out there in the world! :-)

Its scary, but its a ripple!

Ok, definitely NOT my first choice for colors OR yarn, but....you work with what you've got right? ;) In the meantime, I'll just burn my retinas looking at it :)

This crazy blanket started off with the idea of making a scarf for my husband for Christmas. He's a hawkeye fan, thus the black/white/gold. Tried knitting about 4 different patterns, frogged 4 different scarves, hating them all. Then decided to make it into granny squares, and make a blanket....hated those too. Just didn't look right.

So...balled it all up and stuck it back in the closet until finally one day thought "hmm...might as well use it as a practice ripple" since I still can't make up my mind on what yarn I want to use for my "real" ripple. So I decided to make it into a blanket for my son - who is 2 1/2 and thinks the colors are just fantastic ;)

Its about half done, and when I took the pictures yesterday it was *about* 32" long and 45" wide. Guesstimate ;) I'll have to actually sit down and measure soon.

So that's where I'm at for now! I'll post when its finished.

(red heart acrylic yarn, 5mm hook, softwaves pattern)

Out of yarn - again

So this is how far I got this time...

The three balls of white yarn from eBay arrived, but the rest hasn't yet, so now I'm stuck again and suffering from withdrawal symptoms.

Novice Questions

Hi there, I'm new to this blog and new to crochet. I tried to get started on my Soft Waves (from the 200 Ripple Stitch Patterns book) ripple blanket yesterday and I'm pretty sure I'm doing something wrong. I have a couple of questions...

1. The pattern says that you should start with a foundation chain of 12 + 3 chains. I'm using 195, but I'm not sure if I should count the one on my hook. I don't think that I should, but I just thought I'd ask the experts for clarification.

2. The pattern also says that you should end row 1 with 2dc into the last ch. If my math is correct, you should only have enough chains for this to be the first of [2dc into the next ch] twice. Am I right about this?

I think I'm having trouble starting with the right number of chains. Who knew that it was so hard to count to 195.

Thanks in advance for any helpful hints