Wow, I make a lot of blankets! Yes, I know I've said it before, and to be honest I'll probably say it again. For example, I still have the disastrous rainbow ripple blanket to finish, or my small spotty blanket. Also the Star Wars intarsia blanket I haven't touched since I last blogged about it two years ago, or the two C2C blankets for my nieces. I'd also quit like to make a blanket for my grandma one day very soon (tm). But this post isn't about any of those however. This post is about a blanket that I was posting about two years, and one that I actually finished. This post is about my Square-a-day blanket.
About three years ago I had the fantastic idea that I could easily create a blanket with very little effort. All I had to do was to create one square every day for a year. I even had a great starting point - Crochet to Go by Ellen Gormley, a book that I had previously picked up in the Range, though is easily available on Amazon.
Unfortunately, as with any "resolution" to do things on a daily basis (I haven't kept my promise to go to the gym regularly for about 4 years, for example) I often faltered in my goal and it took much longer than a year to complete the requisite number of squares. And as much as I had promised myself to do every square out of the Crochet to Go book, I regularly browsed the internet looking for....well....more interesting squares. Using as many scrap ends as possible, the patterns I used in the end are as follows:
Square patterns from Ellen Gormley's "Crochet to Go!" book, published by D&C:
- Puddles Gather Rain
- Eyelets
- Oscar Square
- Cherry Cordial
- Pick a Posie
- Team Captain
- Star Power
Patterns found online:
- Manghan linen stitch square by Dedri at Look At What I Made
- Sweetest Baby Blanket found on Moogly blog
Other patterns:
- Standard granny square
- Solid Granny square
- Circle in a square pattern (improvised!)
In the end I had to do slightly more than a years worth of squares, as 365 squares don't really make an even rectangle, so there were 374 squares in total Still fewer squares than my sock weight My Little Pony blanket though, which had 493! I finished crocheting the squares in August of 2016 (wow, that was forever ago!) and it took me a whole month to join them all together in a simple SC join!
For the border, I had some wonderful hand-dyed rainbow yarn from Arwen Makes. (She has an etsy store, though we conducted my custom order through her Facebook page). The yarn was wonderfully soft, and exactly to my specifications. I had two skeins dyed and caked up, and they edged the blanket wonderfully, and I still have one whole gradient left over (about half of a cake) which I intend to use to edge the Spotty blanket I'll probably never finish!!
I didn't want the border design to detract too much from the rainbow gradient, so I opted for a simple scalloped edge. I did consider adding little picots to the top of the scallops, but it really did look too busy so I scrapped it pretty early on.
The end result was a wonderfully large blanket which managed to cover most of my (UK) double bed. It's incredibly warm and - unlike my Truly Hooked blanket - it has held up well in the face of repeated washing over the last two years. There has been a small amount of fading in the hand dyed border, but very little colour bleeding into the surrounding yarns. It has also been peed on by the resident Hellbeasts, and so I'v put the lack of colour bleeding down to the fact that the cream edging yarn was not natural merino as in the TH blanket, but cream Wilko acrylic. Cheap and cheerful!
It feels like forever since I last blogged about my Truly Hooked blanket club. It's been almost two years! Whilst creating the blanket, I was so impressed by the vivid colours of the yarn, and how unbelievably soft and squishable it was. I was so excited for each month to bring me new yarny post so that I could add to the blanket I was slowly creating.
I never did receive another pack that quite matched the yellow for brightness - I mean, that pack was practically glow in the dark bright - but the colours continued to be just as rich, and the yarn was just as soft. The gradient continued with a yellow-green, a turquoise, and finally ended with blue, the last of which I forgot to take photos of before I worked them up, which is a shame. I was in such a hurry to complete them I forgot that tiny little detail...
The pattern that I chose for this blanket was the Sunny spread, free from Red heart, with an added crab stitch around the original border. It is a lovely pattern, but had I known then what I know now, I would have chosen a different one. And I would have partnered the colours with a charcoal grey rather than cream. I didn't want to use a pattern that worked in rows, as I was worried that I would run out of yarn before I finished the row or section that I was working on. Now I feel that rows would have shown off the wonderful gradient a lot better. Also, rows wouldn't have been so affected by colour bleeding. *facepalm*
Unfortunately - and as mentioned before - I live with three cats. Although I'm not sure "cats" is an appropriate term for the monstrous creatures that I happen to live with. More like furry little hellbeasts from the ninth dimension. They're evil. Not long after I took the photograph that I am about to post, one of the little assholes decided to pee all over this nice new blanket that was spread over the bed.
And.
It
STUNK!!
Unfortunately for my soft, squishable, gorgeously vivid hand dyed merino rainbow blanket, the only way to get the stink out was to machine wash it. At a high temperature. The washing instructions for such yarns are usually to hand wash, at cool temperatures (and to dry flat, for what it's worth!) The beautiful vivid colours that I loved so much....well....they didn't survive. There was colour bleeding. Lots of colour bleeding. The stark contrast between the bright rainbows and the soft cream? It's gone. The blanket now looks as though a toddler was let loose with finger paints on a dirty grey canvas. Technically? It's still rainbow. And it's definitely still amazingly soft. But it has broken my heart. I was so in love with that blanket, and now it's ruined. And I haven't been able to used hand dyed yarn since. I love it, I keep buying it, and man, do I want to use it. But I'm ruined for hand dyed at the moment...
When I found out I was pregnant this time last year, to say I had mixed feelings would be an understatement. Obviously I was happy - It was what we had wanted for some time. But I was terrified. After our previous problems, culminating in losing our son in 2015, pregnancy was a terrifying concept - every day that went by should have been something I enjoyed, a celebration, but instead it was just one more day that something could go wrong. Even though we were offered a new scan every four weeks, I struggled to believe it was possible that everything would be okay.
It was for this reason that I was reluctant to crochet anything. I had previously started cross stitching the Vermillion Stitchery Fantasy bears onto a 16 count afghan for Quinn, and to this day it is sitting in a drawer, unfinished. I found many beautiful patterns online for everything from blankets to booties, rattles to cardigans, and more. But I was frozen in fear. While people around me were excitedly baby shopping, I was to scared to believe. Melodramatic? Maybe. But no less true.
After we passed the six month mark, I decided to risk crocheting something. But what? It had to be a blanket. Every baby born into my family has had a blanket. Both of my sons, my nieces, even my mum and sisters. I knew our baby had to have a blanket. A rainbow blanket for our rainbow baby.
I had originally wanted to use the My Little Pony yarn from Dye Candy for this blanket, but my son had previously claimed those and was not letting go. With only 12 weeks to go before bay arrived, buying more yarn wasn't exactly an option - babies are expensive!! So I raided my stash and discovered an unused Easter yarn box - nine mini-skeins of sock weight rainbow yarn. The rainbow gradient wasn't complete, however. I had a lovely deep pink-red, all the way through to bright yellow-green, but nothing beyond that. I couldn't have an unfinished rainbow, so I took to my trusty online yarn supplier - Wool Warehouse. There, I was lucky to find some mini skeins of sock weight cotton for only £0.59 each! Buying several of each colour needed to complete the gradient - as well as several skeins of Drops Safran cotton in off-white - I knew I had my colourway. I just didn't have a pattern!
One pattern I had always been fond of was the "Call the Midwife" blanket. However, at the time I was considering making the blanket, the CtM was a very popular pattern choice - and it still is, actually - and I wanted to be different!! By chance a pattern was posted to one of the many Facebook groups I follow, and I fell in love with it. Firstly, for its pattern - similar to the CtM, but different at the same time. Secondly, for its name - "Rainbow Spirit". A bit cheesy, maybe, but I felt the name embodied the very feeling I was trying to convey. I was sold!
Combining each colour with a strand of off white, I was able to work up the blanket as if it was DK weight yarn. Following the pattern, however, I soon encountered a problem - I had too many colours!! Ok, not your average crochet problem, I'll admit, but the blanket was going to work up too long and narrow for a baby blanket. I had come too far to frog it, and I certainly didn't want to leave any colours out... I would just have to widen the blanket in some way. Though when it came to the end, I didn't have enough yarn left over to do much of anything. A simple SC rainbow gradient down the right and left sides was all my leftover yarn could muster! Still, with all those colours, I managed to add several inches onto the width. It was about twice the size that I had originally intended, but that just meant it would last her longer!!
To finish, I decided not to use the edging that came with the pattern, but instead used an eyelet lace pattern that I found here on Ali Pyper's blog. Blogger is a great place for crochet patterns, it seems!!
Since her safe arrival I have been inspired to crochet so much for her, but this blanket was the first ever item crafted for her by me, and I'm hoping that she continues to use it for many years to come!
Another blanket post! I get the feeling that I make more blankets than anything else! Still, at least people are warm, am I right?
This wonderfully colourful blanket was recently made for my friend's nan. She (my friend) came to me in March to tell me that her nan had recently been admitted to hospital and diagnosed with dementia. She asked if I might liaise with the local crochet and knitting group, "The Crafty One's" (sic) and maybe come up with some sort of fiddle blanket that she might give to her nan.
Now, this woman dragged her ass out of bed in the middle of the night to pick me up and take me to hospital after our taxi abandoned us on my doorstep when the driver realised I was in labour. Contractions were two minutes apart - my daughter was on her way and would have been born on the doorstep were it not for this lady. There was no way I was going to say no!!
Stash wasn't a problem - I have yarn coming out of my metaphorical ears. I had more than enough buttons, beads and patterns, and I even had some left over pink granny squares from when I was making blankets for the preemie ward at the hospital. However, with a relatively new baby to care for, there was no chance I was going to be able to do much in and short space of time. So even if my friend hadn't suggested I ask the Crafty One's for help, I was going to have to ask for it anyway.
I put a plea out for donations of squares - any colour, any size, any stitch, and of course the wonderful ladies of the craft group were more than happy to help! I had an influx of wonderful squares from people, and added to the 12 that I had somehow managed to do, we had the makings of a great blanket after only a week, including some knitted squares.
What I hadn't considered previously was how I was going to join said squares. I had squares of all shapes, sizes, gauges and stitch counts, and I am a person who likes things to be precise, neat and orderly. When I realised that it would be impossible to make all of these squares the same size and stitch count, I had a little bit of a minor melt down! It was a real challenge to accept the "chaos" of the mismatched squares, the lack of coordination in the colours. I opted for a join as you go method, as my usual method of simply crocheting the squares together was not going to work here, and I again turned to Wilkos Stripes yarn in rainbow colours. Its a relatively cheap mixed fibre yarn, a little scratchy at first but very warm and washes well. The self striping rainbow colours enhanced the patchwork random feel of the squares, and in the end it actually worked up quite well.
To truly make it a "fiddle" blanket though, it needed an assortment of appliques, buttons, and other varied textures. I had mentioned that the blanket was hopefully going to have a garden theme, and one of the ladies at the craft group had kindly donated a bag of flowers, which I sewed into the name squares to look like entwined vines. I added flowers of my own, as well as a fox, rainbow, and squares which spelled out the lady's name. I used the chunkiest buttons I could find in my collection, (and they're really not going anywhere now - very securely attached!!)
Overall, the whole blanket took four weeks and cost only £8 in rainbow yarn. Despite this relatively low cost and me feeling very outside of my comfort zone the entire time, I did feel good when it was finished and I got sent a photo of the lady snuggled under her nice new blanket. A lovely community project which only serves to prove that - if you look for it - you can still find the sense of community in people. :)
Do you know that feeling you get when you are in the middle of creating something amazing? You are enjoying every stitch, and can't help but look at it over and over. It feels nice, it looks great, you feel so proud of it... But the more you look at it, the more you think that something seems off... Maybe the squares aren't lining up quite right, or the tension of the stitches appears to change. So you look at it even more, trying to convince yourself that you're being paranoid. But then you see it.... That one mistake that is offsetting the entire project that you have spent so much time and energy on. And because you are a stubborn perfectionist, the realisation that hits you like a mach truck is that the only course of action from here is to sit and unpick all that you have done, taking your work back to the last point at which it was correct... It is a cold and lonely feeling.
I have been here twice. The first time was with my Rainbow Ripple blanket. My rainbow ripple was the second large project I ever started, and as yet it is still incomplete. The plan is to incorporate four repeats of a rainbow gradient of eleven colours, with each colour having four ripple rows. This means that each gradient has 44 ripples, and each ripple takes me about an hour to complete. So imagine my horror when I was just a few ripples from completing my third gradient, and I notice that for some reason, the edges of this gradient are not lining up with the edges of the previous two... It was much narrower here. What had happened was that the first two gradients had been completed with a 5 mm hook, and for some reason I picked up a 4.5 mm when I continued with the third gradient. Since then I have considered many ways to rectify the mistake, but the only way I will be truly happy is by ripping back the entire third gradient, and starting again with a 5 mm hook. As such, the rainbow ripple has gone into hibernation until such a time as I can face it again...
After this disaster, I swore that something like that would never happen to me again. I downloaded the hookers journal from the Crochet Crowd website, in which I made notes about each of my projects. What size hook I was using, the shade, dye lot and samples of the yarn I was using, links to the pattern, etc. So when I was looking at my TH Club blanket last night, I was incredibly annoyed to notice that the squares that I had previously joined together appeared to be wonky. It seems that due to the way I finished the last two rounds of cream, each and every square had three sides of 15 stitches, and one side of 16 stitches. Annoyed wasn't the word. At a time when I had previously been feeling very happy with myself because I had just finished the squares for pack four (and so was this much closer to being up to date) I was suddenly feeling absolutely rubbish. Not only did I have to un-join all 36 squares, but I then had to undo the last two rounds of each and every square, to correct the miscount on that one side that the join was on. Un-believable.
That realisation was last night, and since then I have corrected 12 of the affected 36 squares. Now I have to correct the blue and the purple blocks. Before I leave to do that though, I want to leave on a happy note. So look! Look at the 12 squares that I got right first time! Pretend that they (and I) are absolutely amazing, and they are not representative of the mere 25% of squares that I actually got correct....
Can I cry now.....?
I believe I've already mentioned that I'm a sucker for a good yarn box, so when it was put on Facebook that there would be an Easter collaboration between Truly Hooked, Unbelievawool, and Dye Candy, I just couldn't say no! I was a bit naughty and I ordered the larger box - A little extra cost for twice the amount of hand dyed goodness. Well, it arrived this morning and I was NOT disappointed!
Inside my box were nine mini-skeins of lace weight yarn, in very vibrant pinks, oranges, yellows and greens. They definitely made me think of Spring flowers - more specifically, daffodils. There is also a link to two Ravelry scarf patterns to use your yarn with. Both scarves are free, and have very similar looks, so I think I am going to stay inside my comfort zone and make the crochet one. I could use the yarn on something different, and I know this, but I am always making blankets. I hardly ever branch out, and a nice colourful scarf might be just the thing to get me out of the baby pool! And I get to learn another new stitch, too. These are the two scarf patterns - The Mini Mania Scarf by Sarah Core, and the Crochet Linen Scarf by Heidi Beukelman.
There were also some lovely handmade buttons by Cross Crafts, some beads in case I want to add beads or tassels and, of course, some chocolate. Well, it is an Easter box after all!
Happy Easter!
