Granny Stripes

If you saw my last post about Anzac Day, you may have spotted a little crochet goodness in the first picture.

If you missed it, here’s a closer-up of the crochet:

My recent Disco Willow Blanket is there, plus my Leftover Granny Stripe that I haven’t blogged about since December!!Both blankets got plenty of use that day, and the little person in that picture had a good snuggle with them :)

I feel a bit bad for not doing some kind of ‘ta dah!’ post for the Granny Stripes, but I’m not completely sure that it’s finished. I had wanted to do a proper border of some kind, but I couldn’t decide what I wanted it to be like, so I only got as far as doing a few rounds of DC-chain 1-DC-chain 1 etc, with the following rounds hooked into the previous rounds chain 1 space. Using a different colour for each round gives a good effect with this method.

I also used different colours for each side of the blanket, to keep up the uber-colourful vibe already going on! 

And that’s as far as I have got with this Granny Stripe Blanket, and until I picked it up to take out to Anzac Day it had just sat in a bag in the spare room.

After Anzac Day it was pretty much covered in dead grass and bits of leaf and twig. I’ve read other people’s accounts of how well Stylecraft Special DK washes, so I wasn’t too nervous when I put it in the machine for the first time. Waiting for the cycle to finish, I hoped that nothing would go wrong!! The blanket felt horribly plasticky and stiff when I took it out of the washing machine damp, and I was a bit worried about whether it would ever be the same again though… 

Reading the yarn band, it said that you can use a cool tumbledry with the yarn. As the blanket is so big – double bed size – I didn’t have anywhere to hang it up effectively, so it went into the tumble drier on cool for about 20-30 minutes. I was delighted to discover that it came out as soft as ever! I folded it up to hang it on the airer for a bit, thinking it would be put away again.

Granny Stripe is earning her keep though!! My husband has been complaining about being cold during the night recently as the night-time temperature here has finally been dropping. He’s been saying that it’s about time I finished a blanket so that we can actually use them, so he was really pleased to discover Granny Stripe hanging up, and he put it to work!

I think it goes great with this brightly coloured sheet too, what do you reckon?

Blankety facts:

This blanket is made up entirely of Stylecraft Special DK, in the following colours:

Lavender Meadow Clematis Aster Spring Green Wisteria Magenta Cloud Blue Saffron Candyfloss Lipstick Sherbert Shrimp Bluebell Pomegranate Turquoise and a darker Purple from which the label had come off)

That's 17 colours in total, but I'm not really sure of quantities as I was using up leftover yarn from other projects. This included leftovers from an Attic 24 pack I ordered years ago, so the colours are very similar to her Granny Stripe Blanket, although the effect is very different simply by creating my own colour order.

For my colour sequence, I have gone for random - as random as possible! I did actively try to keep similar colours apart, giving lots of contrast between each stripe. I also deliberately spaced out the reds - Lipstick and Pomegrante - fairly evenly to keep it balanced. I didn't have much greeny colour either, so I also tried to spread these out a bit.

In the making of this blanket, so many colour combinations appeared that made me feel really inspired for future blankets! I really want to make more! I didn't manage to get any yarn for Christmas (boo!!!!) but I still have Cuddly and Cotton Hexagons to keep me going for a while. When they have run out though perhaps I can treat myself to some new Special DK, and have more colour play in my crochet life :)