Grey Blanket by The Patchwork Heart

I fell in love the colours of the grey blanket posted on Patchwork Heart's website made up from using Stylecraft DK in lovely bright colours of spice, parchment, meadow, petrol, silver, lime, storm blue, mocha, grey, denim and graphite.  I added my own twist by switching pistachio for denim.  

To avoid duplicating the squares with the same colours I created a spreadsheet and worked out a pattern for the colours.  By using  the "CountIf" feature in Excel I could then see how many occurences I had of the different colours and also balance this out over the rounds.  

I joined all the squares together as I worked the last round in grey and did the wave pattern on the final round of the edge.  

Here are some photos of my work as I went along.

Thinking about the layout of the finished squares back in January. 

Following this I individually soaked each square and laid out on a frame to shape them as they dried.

In March I started joining the squares beginning with row 1 working left to right.  

I joined the second square to the first after I have crocheted around three sides of the first square.  This first square will be in the top left corner.  I follow this process for all the squares in the row until I got to the last square. When I worked the final square in the row, I just worked the two edges.  

Row 2 - Working from right to left, I began joining the first square in the row directly beneath the last one I worked in the row above.  After two rows of joins are completed I worked a row of trebles across the entire row (left to right) so that the joining began on the third row from right to left.

You can find out more about joining as you go from this blog site page.

After all the rows were joined I completed the edging where the joining had not included the edging on the other three sides. Following this I did a number of rows to give it a border and then finished it off with a wave edging.

The blanket was soaked and laid out to dry to let the yarn settle into place.  It's now complete and ready for sale.

Here is the finished product, Enjoy xxx

My First Top Down Crocheted Jumper

My love of card making, which incidentally, hasn’t fallen out of favour, is currently on the back boiler.  This is because I have made that many cards, that I simply do not know what to do with them all! The downside of this is that I simply do not have anything to post on my blog on a regular basis.  Still the upside is that I have been saving lots of money by not buying any craft materials so I am financially better off!

Since my lasting posting I have been working on a few crochet projects.  It is strange that before I get one completed I am inspired by something else and before I know it I am beginning a new project!  In fact at one point I had three blankets, a cardigan and a jumper on the go.  I even have my eye on another project I want to make.

The unfinished cardigan is being made from a “tried and tested” pattern I got from Craftsy which comes with a tutorial.  This will be the third cardigan I have made with this pattern, this time in blue and again, using Lion Brand Wool Eaze yarn.  Being able to re-use a pattern like this makes the Craftsy class good value for money.  I have made all the elements and it just needs joining together.  Before joining the sleeves to the body I have made pattern pieces from the parts.  I am interested in developing my own clothing and having pattern pieces will be helpful.  Hence the delay in getting this one completed.

The Grey blanket I am working on is nearing completion so I shall write about that very soon.  I also have a blanket on the go as a present for my mum but there is no hurry for this as it doesn’t’ need to be ready until September and the third blanket which I recently started is the Hooked and Locked CAL blanket.  This is my first dapple into filet crochet.  I can't wait to share this with you too!

The news today is to share my completed jumper. The story is that I brought the yarn some time ago then couldn’t find the pattern that it was for.  I have learned that when I buy yarn in advance of a project to keep everything together! 

Working a pattern top down was a new experience for me.  I looked at top down patterns for jumpers and didn’t find it easy to follow the instructions so I attempted this solo.   The advantage of working this way is that you don’t end up with seams to sew together.   Loosely based on the patterns I discovered, I developed the pattern to my own specification and made up the design as follows:

I am really pleased with the outcome.  I know it isn’t perfect but it looks great and the yarn I used, Drops Air, is super soft and light weight.

Well, what do you think?