Trick or treat crochet blanket

It's almost Halloween, I absolutely love Halloween and getting creative this time of year, but have never crocheted anything hallo-weeny before...I know shocker! So I decided to make a pram blanket for my youngest, because although she will enjoy walking around and knocking on people's doors and probably chatting to every passer by she still will spend a lot of time in her chair. I have also never done a graphgan before so perfect time to try.

This is the graph I drew :)

To do the graph I firstly downloaded some graph paper from http://www.printablepaper.net/ I found that the cross-stitch graph paper was best to use. This one has 14 squares per inch which was perfect for the height but I did actually have to add another square on each side for the width. Each square was to represent a single crochet and with that in mind I drew out what I wanted the blanket to look like.

I had a little bit of trouble at first with starting the blanket because I had all the colours I needed but black so I went to buy black from the shop and once I got home realised I spent £8 on the wrong type of wool. Instead of double knit I had gone and brought chunky. Well after some moaning and contemplating going to buy yet more black wool in double knit I decided to stick with the chunky as the nights are getting colder and it would keep Pennie extra warm. I brought white and red in chunky but not having much patience for internet buying and not being able to find orange and green in town I decided to double up the double knit I had to make the wool thicker to match the rest of the blanket and having now finished it, you can not tell the wool used for the pumpkin is thinner than the rest. 

Starting the blanket, I obviously hadn't learnt my lesson from the last blanket I did...don't use loads of big balls of wool because...

this happens!

And when you try to untangle everything which is surprisingly relaxing, this happens...

Where I had been pulling at the wool to try and untangle everything some of the wool had stretched and the strands were beginning to part. The string to the right looks fine but as you can see the one on the left has got gaps along it. 

So lesson being learnt I decided to make some bobbins 

They don't look like anything significant, all they are are bits of a cereal box cut up to wrap wool around. I was apprehensive about using them because I hate weaving in ends and I didn't think they looked as if they would hold that much wool but surprisingly they hold quite a bit:

If anyone decides to make these make sure to put in a split at the end of each card because it can be used to hold the strand in place when not in use. If it is not held in place then you still end up with a tangled mess.

So having spent quite sometime sorting out my bobbins my crocheting continued with my two little helpers,cutting up my bobbins and running away with my balls of wool.

and after all that there was the dreaded weaving in aghhhh. Some of it I had weaved in as I went along; holding the loose strand in place under the wool I was using but I only did this if the colour I was using matched the colour I was trying to weave in. Most of the time this wasn't possible and so I had to weave in after by going back and forth through the matching colours. I do not like my loose strands under a different colour in case they are visible and going through after with a needle 3 times means the strands would definitely never loosen. 

And ta-da

A completed blanket measuring 26 inches wide and 31 inches high

I am pleased with the finished blanket but I'm in no rush to work with chunky again as it hurts my wrist and arm a little to much. It maybe that I did the project with a 5mm hook which made the stitches a bit stiffer to work with but it will definitely keep Pennie warm. Thinking of a Christmas one next. 

Oh one more thing...can you tell what's different from the graph to the actual finished project:

I decided I wanted the writing more centred so recounted as I went along. I'll have to redo it one day and post it.

Happy Halloween xxx

Corner to Corner Blanket

A couple of weeks ago I decided to learn a new crochet stitch called corner to corner. I had seen a lot of lovely items made with this stitch so wanted to give it a try.

I started by looking through the internet for an easy lesson and came across one of the crochet crowd videos http://thecrochetcrowd.com/cornertocorner/ which is very easy to follow.

This is what I did as my first practise piece using the video tutorial. 

The idea of this stitch is to start in the corner of your project, so instead of working length ways you end up working horizontally. The practise piece I finished off as a rectangle but it can also be finished of as a square. To finish of as a square you decrease equally on both sides of the project but for a rectangle you only decrease one side whilst continuing to increase the other.

Anyway after doing my practise piece I decide to make a small pram blanket and just plan as I go along for colour changes...remember I said small!!!

This isn't even half way!

I started the pram blanket with just a change of colour when I got to start a new line. I soon got bored. I wanted to try and see if I could start another square within the square I was making and so came the multi-coloured square you see here. It was surprisingly easier then I thought it would be; just make sure to start the square on a line with an odd number of stitches so that when the first set of stitches go in to make the corner you have an equal amount of stitches on either side. I was really amused and confused at one point because I expected the white to get smaller as my multi-coloured square got bigger. Of cause it didn't because for each increase on the multi-coloured square I was increasing the white...duh. 

As you can see though I wasn't satisfied at just doing one multi coloured square. I had to try and add another square but this time having the side facing the original starting corner. At this point I was still completely clueless about just how big this blanket was about to get, although I knew it was no longer going to be pram sized.

It's huge!!!

Reality soon set in about how big the blanket was getting and my eldest daughter had now laid claim to it, I still wasn't satisfied with the lack of changes in colours so decided I was going to make the entire thing look symmetrical, with both halves having the multi-coloured square and also one in the centre of the purple square. I wanted to put the purple lines seen at the starting corner at each of the other 3 corners but  by the time it came to possibly adding them in my brain had decided it no longer liked maths and I couldn't figure out if I had correctly counted the stitches and couldn't be bothered to frog everything if I was wrong, so I left that idea and decided I will just make the last corner match. Also I was starting to panic that I was running out of wool and had no clue where I got the purple from...oops. I had plenty of white and the multi-coloured wool I knew was sold by paintbox so that was ok but the purple I thought I brought from the £ shop wasn't.

2 different shades

Luckily I remembered I had a tub full of different shades of purple buried under an avalanche of other things waiting to be used for crafting one day and there inside were 3 balls of the exact colour I needed. I only needed the one and was extremely happy because now I didn't need to buy any more.

I finished!!!

After about 2 weeks I finished the blanket which measured 43 inch squared and my eldest loved it, she hasn't allowed me to take it off her bed since she got it at the weekend; so well worth doing. I love how the pattern of corner to corner works with the stitches, it looks so different from what I normally do. I still regret that this blanket hasn't got more colour changes though and I wish I had outlined the multi coloured squares to make them stand out more but as a first blanket using this stitch I don't think I did to badly.

I have already started planning my next corner to corner blanket and by planning I mean actually drawing it out on a graph and counting out how many stitches it will be before it comes to actually making it so no more surprises on how big it will get. 

Next time I'm also going to be more careful not to knot up my colours...well I say that but I just started a graphgan yesterday and so far haven't kept to my promise of keeping my colours a little neater. Maybe next time.

If you like crocheting and haven't done a corner to corner give it a try it is very easy and if you don't plan it can be quite fun to see what you end up with xxxx