Glastonbury - The Edge of The Edge

Well, I’m pretty excited to be sharing this after a few days of work, but I think that my edging plan for the Glastonbury Blanket is working out, and that it won’t be long before I have a finished blankie to share and then rehome!

Last time I showed you Glasto the edge was looking like this, with a few turquoise rounds to start things off:

I had been thinking about a big colourful edging, but I really wanted to do something lacy and fancy, and I thought I might just have a little idea for how to combine the two, and here it is…

I chose edging 93 from Edie Eckman’s ‘Around the Corner Crochet Borders’, as it had the lacy sort of feel I was after, while not requiring an excessive amount of rounds to create it (I’m aiming to have it all finished for the end of the month, when I will be seeing my Aunt anyway. She won’t be expecting it so soon, so I reckon it will be a great surprise!):

For the extra colour, I was inspired by the blanket patches themselves, specifically the way you first add a chain round to the circle motif, which you then crochet onto in order to square it off (and no doubt I was inspired subconsciously by various things on Pinterest – I’ve noticed loads of similar ideas since I thought of this!) So, I next added a round of chain stitches in a contrasting colour to the previous Granny round:

Excuse the crappy colours on this photo - it was taken late at night under dodgy artificial light, and I can't correct it any better than this :(

Then I did Granny clusters onto the chain round – they look a bit different being done onto the chain rather than into a space, but that’s ok – I think it adds to the idea that we are now off the blanket and onto the edge:

Same goes for this photo...

I started these first couple of rounds at the same time, doing a bit of chaining then a bit of Grannying all the way round, so that I could see straightaway if it wasn’t working - rather than after doing a few full rounds! While I was doing this, I extended the idea of doing a check before fully committing, and I built up one small tester section all the way to the lacy bit:

For some reason the deep purple colour doesn't show up very well - it's much nicer than the pic suggests!

My gut feeling about this tester section was that the depth of the chain-Granny section was too similar to the lacy border section, and dwarfed it a little. I thought I either needed to make a much wider section of chains and Granny clusters so that it felt like a different part of the blanket onto which a nice lacy border was added, or I needed to make it a tiny bit narrower so that it didn’t compete so much with the lacy bit (have I explained that ok? I know what I mean but I don’t know if I’ve expressed it very well!) The blanket is now pretty big and time is pretty short, so making it narrower won, and I decided to leave off the final chain-Granny combo. I had originally imagined making the colour bit much wider, so the border isn’t as colourful as I’d pictured, but I still think this adds a bit of interest. Froggy certainly thought so, and he hopped by to watch me work :)  

I heard a little thud at the patio door, and look who was there!

The next day, as I added the final, Bright Pink, chain round, I thought that this almost worked as a border itself! 

I had worked out that an even number of Granny clusters was required as the base for the edging pattern, and my turquoise clusters were an odd number. 

I therefore added a normal Granny round in the Emperor (the deep purple colour I'm using for the edging) to increase the cluster count by 1 to make an odd number (adding a chain-Granny combo increases the cluster count by 2). The brilliant thing about making the blanket square, is that I only needed to do any calculations for 1 side – yay!! The need for this extra round was a bit of a blessing, as when I had been making my tester section, I hadn’t been so keen on the lacy bit going straight onto the Turquoise. When I added a Granny round in the Emperor upon which to start the lacy bit, I thought it looked much better - so it worked out perfectly!

With the Emperor Granny round on top of the chain-Granny combos, I again felt that this could be a good simple edging just as it was:

But I wanted the lacy bit!! So I began with round 1 (of course…) and it created a nice open shell edging, which seemed like another good, simple edging technique I could use in future:

I’m enjoying the edging, it’s a straightforward pattern that is easy to hook, and I think will look really effective. And while the maths in the book seemed a little daunting, when I just went ahead and applied the pattern to the blanket for my test section it was actually really simple to ignore the stitch count altogether! A full repeat just requires 3 spaces across 2 Granny clusters (before, middle, after), and each corner requires a single Granny cluster either side of the corner chain (2 clusters in total). And therefore any even number of Granny clusters – so easy counting!

So, here it is as of yesterday (it's too gloomy and soggy out for a decent picture today), with just 3 more rounds left to go to build up the lacy edging pattern. I’m so excited to see this pattern come together, and I think the colour/lacy compromise is working (even if I haven’t made it quite so wide and colourful as I’d imagined). I’d love to hear if you think it works too – I love a second opinion! 

I can’t wait to share this with you again, but as a finished blanket :)