Until my early 20's I was mainly into wool crafts - knitting mostly, although I did do a little bit of crochet. I knitted anything - jerseys, blankets, toys for myself, friends, friends babies or really anybody who was prepared to accept them.
When my daughter was born you would have thought that I would have knitted loads for her. Sadly, for some reason I stopped knitting, and have only ever knitted her one jersey, when she was about 3. I don't know if it was that I was too busy or I just got burnt out, but for years I didn't knit/crochet at all. I did still look at patterns and browse wool shops, but that was as far as it went.
After a few years I started scrapbooking and card making and approached this with the same obsession as I had the knitting in my youth. However, in time I felt the need to get back to my first love and started crocheting in 2013. Why crochet and not knitting? I think it is a little bit more portable and more forgiving in that if you drop a stitch you don't have to unravel the whole item. I have done a bit of knitting in the last few years, but mainly focused on the crochet
At the end of 2013 on instagram I heard of the
Crochet mood blanket 2014 where you do a square a day based on your mood. Although I had never had any luck with year long projects of any sort, this captured my imagination and I managed to more or less keep up and actually finish in January 2015, more or less on time. When 2015 came along I decided to do a sky blanket where you do a square/stripe based on the colour of the sky. I chose to do stripes and have really battled to keep up, although I have now managed to get up to date. This photo shows my progress up to Mid October,
Over the last few months I have been thinking about what I am going to do in 2016. One of the problems I found this year was that there were very few people doing a sky blanket and so there was none of the camaraderie that I had found in the mood blanket. One of my thoughts was to do a weather blanket, but with the mainly hot temperatures we have here, I was not sure if I would get much variety on a daily basis. Also, the traditional "hot" colours are not my favourite, I prefer the blues, pinks, lilacs etc to the reds and oranges.
The basic principle is the same as my 2015 blanket. You crochet/knit/sew a stripe or block a day which reflects the colour of the sky. Initially I was a bit unsure as to whether I was going to do it again. I thought that I would get a bit bored, and also had been wanting to do the temperature blanket. However, after much thought and lots of stalking the facebook group I have decided to go ahead and join in for 2016.
Once I had decided to do it, the next thing was what form is it going to take. Well, I cant sew, so that is out. But was I going to knit or crochet and is it going to be squares or stripes. I have almost 100% decided on squares for a few reasons. Firstly, the boredom factor of doing the same thing for 2 years in a row. Secondly the rows makes a HUGE blanket. The mood blanket was a square a day and is just about double bed size. Thirdly, I did battle to complete a row each day, and got quite behind at times. Although, this was compounded by a very difficult year in other aspects of my life. However, 2016 has not started yet, so I still have time to change my mind!
Last years blankets was all blues and greys, but I decided to vary it a bit more this year. This is mainly due to inspiration from all the posts about this project. So, over the last week or so, I have been browsing the wool shops and come up with the following:
:
Clockwise from top left:
Elle family knit Coral - sunrise / sunset
Charity Apricot - sunrise/sunset
Charity Citrus - sunrise/sunset
Charity Banana - those hot, sunny, summer days
Charity Saxe - blue skies (still to decide how I will differentiate)
Lollipop Light blue - paler blue skies
Chick Seaborne - those days where there is a bit of everything
Elle kids birdie blue - partly cloudy
Charity white and then silver grey - overcast
Charity school grey - stormy, rainy
Charity printed Blue fin - those hot days which end up stormy
I did not originally have the apricot. I was not too sure about the orange, but it was the only reddy orange I could find, so I did a set of sample squares to see if I could live with the result and that was when I decided to add the apricot in. Also, I am a bit OCD and don't know if I could have lived with 11 colours lol.
The picture above makes the colours look slightly darker than they are, especially the school grey.
My squares will be 3 rounds of the above pattern, and I will do 19 rows of 19 squares with 5 rows of border.
