Saturday 21 February 2015

Emma's Stripey Blanket

Two years ago I decided to make a crochet blanket for my friend's little girl Emma for her 4th birthday. I spent quite a while looking for a design I liked and whilst googling "crochet blankets" came across some images like this by Julie of Little Woollie -


I followed the link to her website and discovered she was making it up as she went along and sharing her method. I decided to follow her approach as I didn't feel I would get it finished in time if I had to follow a pattern as I would get bored. I much prefer to design my own wherever possible. There also wasn't time to wait for her to finish as I only had six weeks to get the whole thing done!
I opted for a rainbow of pastel colours and using Julie's stitch ideas got cracking.
It was a LOT of hard work! I'd never made anything so big before and at one point I realised I'd made a mistake in the stitch count as I "straightened" a scalloped row and had to rip out six inches of work - a third of the length made at the time! But I got there in the end and even managed to get it washed and dried in time too. Here it is chucked on the sofa for a photo session -




And the project page on Ravelry.

It's been getting loads of views  ravelry, which is what finally made me set up a blog. Initially, I think the views were due to a link in a comment I left on Little Woollie's blog. She's had her pattern printed in more than one magazine I think, so probably more people then look at her site, perhaps read the comments and follow the link, plus via her Ravelry project page as well. More recently, it has been pinned to one of those "crochet forum" boards on pinterest, so a lot of interest has come through there I'm sure. Either way, last time I looked, Emma's blanket had almost 7,000 views! And it's still on her bed too.

I can remember telling her Mum when it had had just over 1,000 views and saying just imagine if each of those people actually knocked on your door and you had no option but to to let them in straight away and take them upstairs to see the blanket in situ on the bed. Then let the next one in and the next one...
(Just had a quick look - 6,928 views. Woo hoo!!)

I've finished/started other blankets since then but more about those another day...

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