Back again... after a long, long break!

It's been nearly three years since I added to this blog! That doesn't mean my hook hasn't been busy though. I've been travelling and crocheting a lot, just not getting round to recording my efforts on the blog. So this is "catch up" time to start a record of what I've been making over the last three years.


The latest work finished was a bundle of five lap blankets for SIBOL. Two of these were made of standard "granny squares" which I made ages ago, but which were just lying in a drawer waiting to be made up into blankets:




Each square was given a matching edging in dc, then joined together using the same yarn, and given a shell edging in the same colour.

Granny squares are quite boring, though, so I looked for something a little more interesting to do, and found a square called "Sunburst" on Ravelry. This gives the effect of a circle inside a square. The first blanket I made with this pattern used yarn I had "recycled" by unpicking a blanket which had become damaged. There were four colours of yarn in this, the dominant one being a shocking pink. The other colours were a paler pink, white and cream. I put the colours together in a variety of ways then edged them all with the shocking pink, again completing the blanket with a shell edging.

These were more interesting squares to make, and I decided to make another blanket using more colours - sometimes doing every round in a different colour, some alternating the colours, some self-coloured. This was a good stashbuster design, using up lots of different yarns to try out the effect of the different colours. Some combinations looked better than others, and eventually I decided that what I liked best was when the colour combination made the circular part of the design stand out from the square around it. Again all the squares were given a matching dc edging, then joined and finished with a shell border.

The final blanket made using this pattern was done in chunky yarns, so each square was made of only five rounds of crochet, giving them the same finished size as seven rounds made with DK yarn. This meant the blanket was much quicker to make than the others - and as each square only used two colours of yarn, there was a lot less sewing-in of ends to do! A shell border didn't seem right for these heavier yarns, so I just completed the blanket with a couple of rows of dc.