Having finished a few personal crochet projects lately, I’ve been in a bit of a quandary deciding whether to start something new, and if so what. I’ve got a lot of partial balls of DK yarn that need using up, particularly from my Bargello Blanket.
Although it feels self-indulgent, I’m calmer if I’ve got a personal project on the go. I am utterly incapable of sitting still and doing nothing, for example when I have half an hour in the car waiting for one of my kids to finish a class. I’m not always able to do work crochet or fine work in those circumstances (if it’s very dark or I’m damp from the rain). So having a robust and easy project I can grab on those occasions, but not touch again for a while if I have better things to do, is helpful to me.
Laying out all my acrylic and acrylic-blend DK yarns (I’m doing something else with the pure wool) I think I’ve got a great basis for a throw blanket for the living room in earthy tones. I’ve taken away the colours that don’t play well with the others (a peacock blue, a pumpkin orange), and the remaining colours immediately look like they want to be made into something.
I’m not sure about that acidic yellow or the speckled yarn. I think the speckled yarn might throw things off although it’s a good colour match, and it’s also got a very different handle to the Stylecraft Special which makes up the majority of the rest of the colours. I’ll wait and see if I can find a use for it in later sections of the blanket.
What’s good in this collection of yarns is that I have matching tones in different colours:
And the colours can be arranged into two colour families (I’m designating the grey as an honorary brown):
I have a hankering to make something quite elaborate and have it take a year or two if that’s what it takes, between the renovation of our house that we have going on and the unpredictability of being a small business owner at the moment.
I also feel like I want to make something that really puts crochet on display, but I don’t think I’m up for a whole blanket of blocks. Some long, mindless sections combined with more some more interesting parts to focus on when the mood takes me, seems like the way to go. Granny squares and other crochet blocks are of course also a great way to use up very small lengths of colours, even when they are slightly outside your basic colour scheme – you can sneak a few oddities in, which is fun.
I’ve spent a week or so playing with some block ideas of my own, but yesterday I came to the realisation that this was actually getting in the way of the crochet. I get great satisfaction out of designing crochet patterns, but this is a different kind of enjoyment than the actual process of crocheting. For this blanket right now, I just want to get on with playing with colours and seeing it grow, and I need it now for those damp evenings in the car. I don’t want to have the pressures hanging over me that comes along with creating my own design: that I really ought to be publishing it, and therefore photographing it (requiring daylight hours at home) and writing it up as I go along. So I’ve decided to choose a ready-made design for this blanket, and just enjoy the crochet. Maybe people who paint can also enjoy colouring books – a different sort of pleasure?
This only works, of course, if I can thoroughly trust the design and designer I pick, but I’ve found one that I do. I’m planning a Seed Packet Blanket by Marion Mitchell. It’s the exact mix of fun colour work but not over-elaborate stitching that I want. I want a blanket that’s smooth (no raised motifs, etc) and with no lacey/holey parts, and this fits the bill perfectly.
I wish it were rectangular rather than square, but it’s not too large, so I’m looking at it as a slightly different beast than the several small rectangular lap blankets we use in the living room – this is probably going to stay on display, when those get bundled away for guests!
Colour-planning for the Seed Packet Blanket
I’m probably going to need to supplement my odd balls of yarn with a few new balls to complete a whole blanket, but I’m pleased that the Seed Packet Blanket design means I don’t have to make decisions about that up front. The first section of the blanket is a 6×6 panel of squares, so I can complete this with the yarn I have in hand and then see where we go from there. The aim will be to end up with less left-over yarn that I currently have, and to use up the colours I want less (chartreuse, apricot) in favour of colours I have more use for (dark greens and browns).
In the central panel (Section 1) of the blanket, Idon’t want to use the very lightest or very darkest colours, so that leaves me with something like this:
The first fun task is for me to plan out how I’m going to use these colours. I can’t just ‘wing’ this sort of thing, I need to know there’s a logic in my choices, even if it is not evident in the finished article.
The squares are made up of four rounds, and I want the background of the squares (Rounds 4 and 5) to be the light colours – this makes for an easy checkerboard as I only have two of those colours:
I want the centres of squares to be in the mid colours, surrounded by a dark colour of the same family. Again, I can start with a checkerboard of the green/brown colours – both mid and dark – and then swap out some of the squares for other colours in the same family. So some of the mid brown centres are replaced by the pink that is the same mid tone. I’m aiming not to swap a colour in Round 2 if I have already swapped the colour of the Centre – this I hope will keep the overall homogeneity of the panel.
I would much rather be working with an odd number of squares in each direction, and ideally a rectangular shape, say 5×7, but I’m sticking with the square and using rotational symmetry to create these layouts.
That leaves the clusters in Round 3, which will be a mid colour again, but from the opposite colour family to the centres. Again, I swap out some of the colours for a different mid colour in the same family, but avoid doing this on a square where I have swapped a colour out in Rounds 1 or 2.
Having created the above patterns which seem to give a nice even distribution of the colours on each round, I can test it by constructing a sketch of the panel showing all the rounds together. ‘Reading’ each square in turn, in the above diagrams, this is what I get:
I’ve got to say I’m pretty happy with that!
I’ve got a slight concern I won’t have enough of the teal colour, but I should be able to find something that works.
If Excel and Powerpoint aren’t your thing, by the way, this type of colour planning is exactly what you can use my crochet colouring pages for.
Next I can break the above diagrams down into a crocheting plan so I know what to make:
And from that I’ve made this tick sheet which goes with the yarn in my crochet bag, so I can dip in and out of this project when I’m able and know exactly what I still have to make.
I can’t wait to get started!