My Attic24 CAL blanket – a month’s progress

Its exactly one calendar month since I made my foundation chain for the Attic24 CAL blanket that I’ve been working on. It was my birthday and the time has flown by since then. Christmas is fast approaching and there are all sorts of distractions this month that leave even less time for crochet and crafting.

I am sure that, like many of you, I have all sorts of grand plans when it comes to making Christmas presents for people and handcrafting my own Christmas cards and decorations. More of a fantasy in my case. I am still clinging on to a vain hope that I might get chance to make some Christmas cards for key people in my life and I have finished one crocheted present for a friend. But the several cowls, scarves, and fingerless gloves for family that I was thinking of remain at the yarn-still-in-the-bag stage.

In the last week I been busy decorating (painting the walls type decorating) and putting the Christmas tree up. In between all that, my son had to visit hospital twice with an injured shoulder, so I had to make an unscheduled trip to Sheffield on Sunday. In between all that, I am very glad that I’ve had an easy and colourful project to do in the evenings. The blanket is now a real blanket and it covers me up pretty well as I work on it, soothing away all the frazzles of the everyday.

As of today, I now have 50 colourful stripes, so I’ve just completed 100 rows of crochet on this blanket. That’s about right – around 1.5 colour stripes each day. I’ve seen other blankets growing at a much faster rate but I only have a limited bit of ‘me time’ in the evenings to crochet and I’ve been trying to progress my crochet hexagon blanket too. That can be harder going as its chunky yarn – so quite hard on the fingers. I like coming back to the cosy blanket to get some rest and relaxation.

As the blanket gets bigger it becomes more difficult to photograph. Its difficult to get far enough away from it with my iphone camera to get it all in. I’ve had to put it in the lounge this time, where its doing a good job of being a sofa throw in the day when I’m working. It makes a good sofa throw, but it swamps my wicker chair.

Playing around with the colours

My blanket plan started out having most of the Lucy cosy blanket colours but with a few of my own too. As this is my blanket and I can do what I like, I’ve played around a bit in the last 30 stripes. I had some Meadow green left over from my granny stripe blanket and, looking at this the other day, thought the Meadow was looking OK. So I added a stripe. I like it!

I also added a stripe of violet next to the Emperor purple (wow, that is a good colour combo) and I missed out a raspberry stripe in the second repeat. Its in the third and its going to feature heavily in the border that I’m planning, so that’s not too much of a disaster.

My colours

I had a lovely comment on my last blog about this blanket from Liane who asked if I would list the colours I’ve used. She is from the USA and can only order Stylecraft Special DK online – so she has to buy it with no real experience of what the colours look like.

I am not suggesting for one minute that I am some sort of colour guru, but if you like the look of the blanket I’ve done I would be pleased as punch for anyone else to get some useful information from this list.

Border planning

Next Sunday, Lucy will be showing what border colours and design she has chosen. I’m still keen on the idea of using a strip of tiny granny squares around the entire blanket with a couple of stripes of colour either side.

The immediate border row along the sides will be plum. Originally I had started the border on one side to see how it would look and put in three trebles for each single row, so 6 in each colour stripe. Doing that created a real ripple effect that made the border look very wavy and up and down – so I frogged it out and tried with two trebles per row, so four trebles per colour stripe. That lays nicely flat now and using plum, its not so obvious. My next row is going to be a straight treble row of raspberry and then I think I am going to use camel next to the granny square strip.

This week I need to do some research on joining granny squares to crochet strips to make this look neat and to do some practicing. And I  better get on with some more granny squares. I will need one for every two colours stripes, so about 200 altogether I think…

Trying out a new crochet hook

This weekend I also bought a new crochet hook. Its a Clover Soft Touch Deluxe (3.5mm) and I like it a lot. Its got a comfy grip to hold, like the KnitPro hook I’ve been using but the hook itself is much better quality and seems to glide through the yarn without snagging or catching.

I hope it will speed me up this week to get on with the next 30 stripes. I really would like to get this blanket to the border stage by Christmas – then I can have some fun finishing it over the holiday.