The gingham and Lacy baby blankets were made in the summer of 2020 for my partner's sister who was expecting her second baby. I'd made the lacy one a couple of times before and it was nice to make it again. The gingham was something new and while sewing it together was not a fun task, it was a really nice blanket to make and one I'd definitely like to try again in the future.
The Rainbow Granny Square Blanket started as a side project to use up sample balls of yarn I'd gotten from a magazine which I really didn't like the patterns in. The plan originally was to make as many squares from it as I possibly could and then join them in to a patchwork blanket. But, I soon decided I wasn't going to do that and picked out the colours that I really liked to make 2 of each.
I learned some new techniques making this blanket that have since become a staple for when I make any Granny Square blankets
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December 2020 in to January of 2021 saw the UK in lockdown again. So, bored one day in that weird period between Christmas Day and New Years, I started making myself a grannysquare blanket, looking to consolidate some of the new skills I'd learned making the Rianbow Blanket mentioned earlier.
While working on this, I decided to try streaming my progress on this and some other projects on Twitch and this became my first major project to work on as a crafting streamer.
There are things on it I'm not completely happy with, but, at the time I was still learning about the craft and it was only going to be used by myself. It is now my go-to blanket when it gets cold in the winter
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The first of two blanket projects I started for Pride month 2021 on my Twitch Stream was the Rainbows Through the Storm Blanket.
This blanket is made up of 13 different colours, with the grey being the primary colour (although I have seen it made with white too) and the 12 colours meant to represent the rainbow poking between the rows.
This was more complicated than I expected to make as keeping track of the right numbers of stitches at the ends of the rows proved more difficult than I expected and I had to restart the project after getting it wrong and not realising until 15 rows in.
The second pattern is the Rainbow Silverlace “Blanket”. The design is actually for a blanket and is nice that you can use any weight yarn to make it, with the heavier yarn making a bigger blanket (but also requiring much more to make.
I used a colour changing yarn of quite light weight to make mine and as quirky as it looks, it’s not big enough to be a blanket, but could be folded from the corners to make a bright shawl to drape around the shoulders.
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A commission from my sister, who asked for a simple blanket in these colours to match her recently decorated lounge.
There is a crafter on YouTube whose design for Granny Squares, and how to join them, has now become my go-to for anything crochet who used these colours for their demonstration video (albeit in a different yarn).
I used some formula on Excel to design out the pattern for the squares, and each pattern is only repeated twice throughout the entire blanket and no two identical hexagons are joined on vertically or horizontally to each other (although some may be diagonally)
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I saw this design on Instagram and fell in love with it, but couldn't decide on a valid reason to have a go at making it. Then, the lightning bolt of inspiration hit. Christmas was coming and my grandmother loved the chevron I'd made her, but it wasn't going to be quite wide enough for her bed.
The tricky part was going to be planning out all the different combinations, as there were 12 different colours being used for the main part of the blanket
But. I found a site that allowed me to put them all in and it did the hard work for me. So I made 24 different versions of it so that every one was unique
That may have been my mistake, because the blanket took me an extremely long time to make. But, it was totally worth it in the end
I managed to finish it with a week to spare before Christmas and my grandmother absolutely loved it, leaving it out on display for everyone to see for the 2 weeks after Christmas
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My latest venture in the world of crocheted blankets. For anyone who doesn't know, a temperature blanket is meant to represent the temperatures each day for a certain place over a certain period of time.
Most people choose to crochet their blankets in rows, usually making it a little more fancy with a different style stitch or maybe doing a chevron style blanket. Each row represents a day within a date period, usually over the space of a year from January 1st to December 31st and many crafters choose to base their temperatures on the average temperature of the day.
Being from Wales, this would have given a very different result to what I ended up with as our temperature range is very small, or at least, it used to be. So I opted to base it on the highest temperature recorded.
I also didn't want to do straight rows as I find them very boring, and wanted to learn new things. So I opted for a hexagon to represent every day. I found the style I liked, found the yarn I liked, found a layout that I thought would work best and set to work putting them together.
I got as far as February before I had to take a little break to finish off some other projects. But I kept recording the temperatures each day to make sure I could pick it up when I was ready. But I was concerned. There was A LOT of blue hexagons in the blanket.
Enter March 19th 2022. We'd been forecast a very warm day for that time of year, and I was excited to see the first of the yellow hexagons being introduced. But. It never happened and the temperature the site I was using had recorded kept the hexagon distinctly in the blues. I shrugged and carried on. Perhaps it was colder where the temperatures were recorded.
A couple of days later, I was on a call with some online friends who were also making temperature blankets and we were discussing temperatures as I was updating my spreadsheet when I noticed some small print on the website that led to a lot of profanities. They didn't always capture the most accurate temperatures .... or take regular readings.
One of my friends came through with an absolute life-saver. The site that Apple use for their weather app, which not only showed me the temperatures for that day, but allowed me to go back to January and capture all of the temperatures correctly. Now I had another dilemma. Did I leave the blanket as it was up to the point I'd made and then carry on using the new temperatures, or, did I start again?
I started again
After spending an entire evening undoing 2 months work, I only had to sacrifice one hexagon, something I was very pleased about. Now came the task of joining them all back together and making additional hexagons for the days where the colour had changed. Weeks passed and I caught up to the current date.
But, as you may have already guessed, I don't like doing things the easy way. Someone had mentioned they knew someone who was making a blanket based on the temperatures for the year they were born. my interest wasn't just peaked, I couldn't let the idea go. I found a site that had accurate temperatures for that year, spent an evening recording all the temperatures and ordering the yarn I needed to make a start. So now I was working on 2 temperature blankets at the same time.
We got to the summer, and saw record breaking temperatures across the whole of the UK. Temperatures that were massively outside of the ranges I'd been planning on using. So, at the last minute, I decided to add an extra colour in to the mix for the 2022 blanket. I'd checked against the other and none of the days saw temperatures high enough that it would have meant taking it apart to change.
Working on other projects meant these went on the shelf again for most of the end of 2022, but I picked them up again in early 2023 and both were finished by the end of February.
Come back soon for updates on the one I'm making for 2023....
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