They Call it Mellow Yellow

How was your bank holiday weekend?

Ours wasn’t fun as such, but it was very productive! We did much of our enormous quantities of paperwork for our emigration insurance – trying to work out the cost of replacing all of your stuff, room by room, in British Sterling currency but at buying-new-in-Australia prices, not an easy task!!!!

We also did a car boot sale. It’s the first time in ages that I had done one, and we weren’t sure about how to price things at all – we just had to completely make it up as we went along, and hope we didn't ask too little and miss out, or too much and put people off. In the end though, we sold large pictures, bits of small furniture, lots of clothes, and plenty of random bits and pieces (I never expected people to actually buy second-hand hand cream or deodorant spray!) We still had lots left when we were done, so we took the leftovers in to town, and distributed most of what was left between the various charity shops that were open – Mind, Age UK, and the British Heart Foundation. After buying ourselves a couple of coffees while were out, and paying our pitch fee, we came away with £131.30. My share will be enough to at least MOT my car ready to sell to my aunt, so it’s good to see the benefit of a day’s work :)

While at the car boot sale, I did a bit of multi-tasking: I took with me my yellow yarn and my latest charity blanket project, and with the yarn in a carrier bag to keep it clean and the blanket-so-far tucked under my arm, I managed to hook away for several hours! I got the blanket to the desired square shape, and very pleased with it I was too!

Last night, I decided to have a play around edging it. The design means you end up with 3-chains all around the outside, so very easy to plan an edging design to use. I decided to keep it simple, and after a bit of experimentation I found that simply doing 5 UK Treble stiches into each 3-chain that was next to a treble cluster, then doing one UK Double into the alternate chains (those not next to a cluster) gave a very simple but effective border. Thanks to the blanket pattern you don’t need to calculate anything in order to achieve this – the pattern means that in doing this, you will automatically end up doing your 5 Trebles at the corners. Easy-peasy! To go around the corner therefore, I simply did 5 Trebles into the chain before the corner, a 2-chain picot, then 5 Trebles into the chain around the corner. Perfect!

Now then, I totally appreciate that this is a rubbish explanation of how to do this, so I am hoping that I will be able to perhaps make a bit of a pattern/tutorial of this blanket at some point. I can’t make any promises on timing though, as things right now are simply so busy!

Speaking of being too busy, I also don’t have time at the moment to take any decent photos of the finished blanket – a combination of not having time, not having decent light or space indoors, having bad weather outdoors, and I’m afraid the photos are a bit rubbish. Maybe later, once things have settled down, I can do a bit of a photoshoot of all the charity blankets I manage to make? Plus I still need to photograph the Walled Garden Blanket – lots to do!

For now though, here are the inferior photos of the Mellow Yellow Baby Shawl :)

I love this pattern and can't wait to photograph it properly - and I'd love to make a full-size blanket in this pattern too!