Super Easy Baby Blanket by Purl Soho. This photograph is so inspiring, love the colors. Sadly, I don’t think my knitting skills would do these kits justice. Sigh, one day …
Hyper links now fixed on my Mood Blanket 2014 post
Hi guys! I'm very pleased to announce that all the hyper links on my Mood Blanket 2014 blog post are now fixed! I had to install another browser to do it, but I got there in the end!
New York-based, French photographer Franck Bohbot documents the breathtaking beauty of libraries around the world in his ongoing series House of Books.
(The hyper links are now fixed! Thanks for waiting!)
As some of you know, since January 2014 I've been participating in the Mood Blanket project. I really can't remember how I came across the project, but I instantly wanted to join in! I normally make small projects as my attention span is short, so this was going to be a big challenge!
So, what exactly is a Mood Blanket then? The idea came from Stacey Wentford-Hall as a way to record your mood throughout 2014. You crochet a square or a row each day (365) or week (52) that reflects your mood. Which colours and patterns you use are totally up to you!
I started out assigning colours to moods, but quickly decided that wouldn't work for me. My moods tend to be quite 'samey' and I wanted to end the year with a big, colourful blanket I wouldn't hate! I put the question of colours to one side and instead searched the internet for patterns, looking for inspiration. After looking at many styles of blanket, I came across the Sunburst Granny Square pattern by Nittybits. Bingo!
I fell in love with the bright colours and the clean white, border. This was just the pattern for my blanket! I decided to make it large enough for my king size bed, with each square a different colour combination from the others - no repeats!
Having had previous bad experiences with acrylic yarn and wanting to move away from artificial fibres due to their negative impact on the environment (acrylic is basically plastic and ends up in the sea and land, harming wildlife), I chose to use 100% cotton. Although a little more expensive, it’s cool in summer, warm in winter, gets softer the more you work it, is machine washable on 40 degrees and comes in an array of beautiful colours. I decided on a total of 11 colours, including the white for the borders of the squares. Here is what I used:
Stylecraft Cotton Classique DK
Azure
Hot pink
Soft lime
Lavender
Sunflower
Sky blue
Teddy Cleopatra DK
White
Orange
Red
Dark blue
Dark green
And so, with my trusty 4mm hook, I set to work!
As with most crocheters, I admit that I'm not a great fan of weaving in ends! The Nittybits pattern gave an alternative choice of joining called the join-as-you-go method, which saves some time and creates less weaving in. It also makes a lovely little star pattern between the squares. I highly recommend you give it a go if you haven’t tried it before. Attic24 has a great tutorial here.
And so my Mood Blanket started to slowly get bigger...
And bigger!
I would spend entire evenings and weekends making the circular motifs, before having one massive joining session to add them in, almost adding entire rows at once. I found this much easier to do than making a single motif and joining it in one at a time. I weaved in ends as I went so as not to have a complete nightmare marathon of weaving at the end of the year!
One of the first crafts I began (apart from the obligatory sticking and gluing as a young child) was cross stitch. My mum would always remind me to keep the back of my work neat, telling me that it should be just as neat as the front. I kept this in mind while working on my blanket and I hope she approves! The top 2 rows below show the back of the blanket, the bottom 2 rows show the front.
Many people on my Yellow Sherbet Facebook page have asked me how I managed to not repeat motifs. For example, did I keep a written record of each square? The easiest way I could find without keeping endless notes was to spread the blanket on the living room floor, work the 2 inner rounds of the circular motif, then check each existing square on the blanket by hand. I would then use a colour on the 3rd round that I hadn’t used for that inside combination before. I hope that makes some kind of sense!
This technique wasn’t always fool proof though. Back in October I noticed the unthinkable, I had repeated a square!! A state of emergency was declared and as much as everyone told me it didn’t matter and added a unique element to my project, I just knew it would have to come out. But it would involve frogging (ripping out) nearly 50 squares! It was a disaster! I would never finish by the end of the year now! Then the lovely Vivienne White came to my rescue. She posted a link for repairing granny square join-as-you-go blankets which, after much studying, looked like it would do the trick. After an hour in surgery, the offending square was swapped and order and sanity was resumed! Phew!
As the end of the year started to creep up, I realised I needed to start thinking of a border but I just couldn’t find one I liked. Then someone posted a photo of her blanket on the Crochet Mood Blanket 2014 Facebook group, and I loved it! Her border was ‘seed stitch’, and you can find info and a tutorial on this stitch here. I wish I could remember who it was, but I accidentally deleted her blog :(
So after a year of work, here we have the finished blanket!
I’m a little sad, yet totally relieved that it’s finished! It’s 65 ½ inches wide by 73 inches long, featuring 304 unique squares each 3 ½ inches square, and a seed stitch border of 2 ½ inches wide. Can you believe I weaved in a mammoth 2,496 ends?! So will I be taking part in Mood Blanket 2015? Probably not. Although I’m not ruling out 2016…
To check out more photos of my Mood Blanket from start to finish, check out the album here.
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