Saturday, 23 August 2014

Patchwork Additions


This week it really hit me that something about my patchwork really didn't look right, and I realised I no longer liked the bobble yarn patch (post here) and I wanted to replace it. To get some inspiration, I went to the library I took out a book with crochet afghan patterns and found a pretty flower blanket:



There were two types of flowers, and I preferred the rose style flower. I chose my colours and made a square from the pattern, then I added some triple crochet to two of the edges to make it a more rectangular shape. Then I continued going around the edge with triple crochet until the piece was the size I needed for the blanket.



Once I had replaced my centre square, I only needed one more to finish the entire centre section of the blanket. I wanted to add in some more purple, but wanted to keep it simple. I used 4.25mm needles, cast on 31 stitches, then alternated 5 knit and 5 purl, then each line I moved the knits and purls over one stitch to create a diagonal stripe effect:



I am really pleased with how both squares turned out; I was particularly proud of making my first crochet piece from written instructions alone (no video tutorials) and I used the speed knitting technique to make my knitted patch.

Now have 15 squares making up the centre of my blanket, the next thing I want to do is make a border to go around these squares to straighten the whole thing up and stop the edges curling over etc.

It's about the right size for a baby blanket, but I want an adult size blanket, so once the border's done I will start adding more squares. around the outside.


Wednesday, 20 August 2014

Learning to Speed Knit

I decided as I had finally taken the time to learn how to crochet, I would finally take the time to learn continental knitting, or speed knitting. I then stumbled across this great tutorial on Twitter, which I really recommend for anyone wanting to learn: How to Speed Knit and Speed Purl.

I started off really awful, then just awful, now after a bit of practice I'm 'not bad'.... so I'm slowly getting there, and resisting all urges to go back to my old method of knitting!

Monday, 18 August 2014

Rectangle Granny Patchwork

Granny Rectangle

I decided it was time to add some crochet to my patchwork blanket. I searched for a very straight forward design and found this pattern: Rectangle Granny; to start with I found the pattern very easy to follow, but then I got a little lost as I am still not well practiced in reading crochet patterns. So I searched YouTube for a video tutorial, and found this: Rectangle Granny Method 1 which seemed to use the very same pattern.

yarn and hookOnce I got the hang of the method this was really easy to do without following the pattern, and you can actually just keep going to make the piece as big or as small as you like. I did four rounds.

I decided I wanted to incorporate some blue into the patch, so chose dark blue, light blue and cream coloured yarn, and used a 4.5mm hook.

I am going to add this square into the top corner of my blanket.


If you want to see the patterns for my other patches, please click here.