With a little one on the way at the end of last year I
decided I was going to put the craft fairs on hold and focus on making things
for my long awaited little lady. I spent ages trawling Pinterest for Granny Square type
blocks that I loved. I figured you’ve got to love it, you don’t want to
make a big pile of them then decide you prefer something else. I put together a
little Pinterest board called ‘Blanket Trials’ and collected together a few to
give a go. Having tried 3 or 4 I settled
on this one from Ravelry.
I’d already made a rainbow coloured blanket so decided that
this one should be something more muted. I needed a yarn that was super soft
and went for the Rico Baby Classic from Love Knitting, a yarn I’ve used before
for hats and booties and was really impressed with, it’s 50% Acrylic 50%
Polyamide and I find it feels much more high quality than a lot of other
synthetic yarns I’ve tried. Choosing
colours online can be hard so I tend to copy and paste the pictures of each
colour onto a Word file and put them next to each other to see how they
go. For this blanket I used Green
(28), Smokey Rose (39), Pistachio (06),
Candy Pink (19), Turquoise (25), Dusky Pink (40) and used Ecru (20) to do the
borders.
I find the problem with making lots of granny squares is making sure you have a
variety of different colour combinations so that the blanket looks balanced.
I therefore go through a rough plan to start off with. I make a load of middles first, 2 in each colour, then make sure each of these
has a different colour combination round it, then once I’ve completed these I
go back and make 1 more middle of each colour and do another different lot of
combinations and so. In this way I find the
best way to get a random looking blanket is to actually have some order to it but don't have to plan out exactly every colour combination for every square I'm going to make. When I nearly had enough I then laid them out on the
table. 6 colours is the minimum you need
to make sure that the main colour is not next to or diagonal from a square of
the same main colour. Once I’d laid them
all out I used scraps of paper to write what squares I needed to complete the
blanket.
Once the squares were made I crocheted
them together. I find this much easier and quicker than sewing them together.
It creates a little ridge at the joins of the squares but I quite like this
affect personally.
I was hoping to have the blanket done in time for my little
one’s arrival however on New Year’s Eve she decided it was time
to get going if she wanted to share Mummy’s birthday on New Year’s Day so the
blanket was abandoned along with towels I'd been sitting on in case my waters broke (I didn't stop to take this picture while in labour, I took it when I got home from hospital)!
Finally at 5 months old Jemima now has her finished
blanket! I decided to go for a nice
plain and simple edging and just did 3 rows of double crochet in colour round
followed by 1 row of half trebles round to finish it off.
No comments:
Post a Comment