The Tooty Stripey Blanket finally gets written up!!!

There is now a fully written pattern of this blanket, with full charts, plenty of photos and loads of information, called 

The Allsorts Blanket 

- available on Ravelry.

Who recognises this photo?? This is the stripey blanket I made for a friend's little girl when I was still learning how to crochet, way back in Dec'12 - Jan'13. 

I had a (birthday) deadline, so it was made very quickly, with no notes written - why would I  need notes??

 I created a project page on Ravelry and shared pics on Pinterest, including this one (I used to spend a lot of time on Pinterest back then). I haven't checked recently but I know at one point it had been re-pinned nearly 50,000 times!!

A blanket that was that popular deserved a written pattern surely? So in 2017, when the craft shop I used to have a part time job in, started selling yarn I decided to buy a selection of baby colours and make a new version of Emma's Blanket. And by that time not only had I learned some more stitches - I and discovered TEXTURE!

I set to making a new blanket, designing as I went, trying to write notes along the way but quickly gave that up as the blanket grew just too fast to keep up! Once it was finished, I painstakingly drew a chart detailing every row and so a new blanket was born - the Tooty Stripey Blanket! 

I published the chart on Ravelry in July 2017 and watched it quickly take flight - this  assisted by several free pattern sites that picked it up, and kindly advertised it for me for free!!

It doesn't seem possible that 3 years have passed since that design stage. I've now made several versions myself in different sizes and colours and it has become my signature blanket. And the free chart has been downloaded from Ravelry 17,500 times!!!

Back in mid-April and after much soul searching, I decided to add a very small fee to the pattern (I described it as a 'buy me a coffee' fee), along with a coupon code so customers could sill have it for free if they preferred. 

Several people over those years have said I should have charged for it from the start but it was my first pattern - and just a hand drawn chart at that - but you know I just didn't think it was good enough (or had the confidence!) to charge a fee. 

But then I released my Hope Springs Hat during lockdown. I had already decided to offer it for free during lockdown with a coupon code but I found a very small number of people were paying for it. I thought at first that I hadn't set the coupon code up properly but then a couple of  those people got in touch to say thank you for the freebie but they could afford to buy the pattern and wanted to support my design efforts by paying for it. Hence the soul searching with my blanket. 

Maybe some of those 17,500 people would have been prepared to pay a little for it... So I added a price that meant after all the fees from Paypal & Ravelry are deducted, I would be left with an average of £1 per copy. And I made it as clear as I could that it could still be downloaded for free with a coupon code.

And you know what, a few people have chosen to pay for it - if you're one of them, THANK YOU!!!

Those few sales have spurred me on to write up the pattern in full, pulling together all the other detail from it's blog page, re-writing, occasionally correcting and adding all the extra info I can think of. Hopefully, there will be photos of different stages and if I can manage it, a new computer generated chart, rather than hand drawn (eek!!).

Writing a pattern means testing it as I go by making  a new blanket but there was a problem. Lockdown had not been lifted and the wool shops were not open. I know I could have ordered all the yarn I wanted online but it's just not the same as choosing colours in person. So I kept writing and refining, a bit of testing with some scrap yarn but I felt desperate to buy a nice collection of colours and get cracking with it!!!!!!

Finally, in mid-June I heard Hobbycraft was opening! I went mid-afternoon, hoping the long queue would have happened first thing and I would only have to wait 10 minutes. But no, I waited for an hour and a half!!! Yes, a full HOUR & a HALF. This was entirely due to someone's decision to only allow 19 customers in store at a time. It's a huge warehouse but just 19 people at a time?... But I was desperate, so I waited patiently. And once I was in I wasn't leaving without a big bag of yarn, so I really took my time choosing colours!!!

Now they don't have the best range - they're not a yarn shop after all. So I came home with a big bag of 12 balls of wool - which received admiring glances from those still in the queue.!!

I took a photo of said bag, posed on the very first Tooty Stripey Blanket I had made, which used colours that reminded me of the Tooty Fruity Sweets that inspired the (ridiculous) name. And guess what??

I'd chosen new colours that looked just like the originals!! I had even bought a variegated ball!! That was definitely NOT my intention as I had hoped for a nice balance of summery colours. But I suppose you have to go with what you can get...

 

After getting over my initial annoyance, I made a start on planning a colour repeat. I made some little bobbins of each colour, with 2 each of the paler colours and just one of each bright colour - a total of twenty for my colour repeat.

I ummed and aahed for quite some time, moving them around and taking lots of pics. I added a golden yellow from my stash and a magenta. Still I wasn't quite happy though.

Finally, I decided to toss out the brighter colours you can see in this pic  and went with just the eight pastel rainbow colours that remained. 

Pity they didn't have any lilac ...

That would make the new blanket sample look even closer to the original but by then I had decided it was actually quite fitting to completely revisit the original. 

And don't worry about the colours I tossed out - I already have a project in mind for them!!

During the weeks without fresh yarn, as I said,  I had been refining and tweaking the original design, adding some extra texture rows so that they really do hop from side to side at regular intervals and taking out a couple of bits I wasn't so keen on.

Once I had yarn and started hooking, things progressed reasonable smoothly. However, there were some hiccups along the way... 

I knew I should trust my own pattern, having spent so much time and effort getting it just right. But I just couldn't help trying to tweak-as-i-go... although most of those attempts ended up with a whole lot of ripping back and doing what the pattern said - including one section that had 13 rows!!!

 

Once the main body of the blanket was completed, I  started stitching in all the ends, ready to start on the border. I considered stitching in as I went but as this was my working sample - and I kept tweaking then ripping out - I thought it wise to leave them all until the end. Once they were all done it had a little photo-shoot and will get a light blocking to properly straighten the edges, before adding the border.

But it's going well so far. Very well actually. I have a BIG smile as I look at this photo -

I've also thought long and hard about what name to give this new, fresh version of the #tootystripeyblanket . As It will be a paid pattern on Ravelry, it can't have the same name as another pattern I sell. I also want to distinguish between the chart only version and the fully written. So a new name was needed and it dawned on me that there really was only one name that would fit. 

May I introduce my signature blanket, The Allsorts Blanket!!

Shame I didn't think of it 3 years ago when I settled on tooty stripey...

There's still quite a way to go before I can publish the pattern, not the least of which will be drawing the new chart... But it will be announced here, as well as over on Instagram. And probably fb too....

Watch this space, as they say!!  Bye for now, T xx