Winding Skeins

I only recently discovered how to successfully rewind skeins and balls of yarn into the most useful kind of ball. The kind that will unravel from the centre. It's great for crocheting on the move as it can be tucked neatly in a bag and used from there, and it's also great at home - no need for yarn holders or leaping across the room chasing a wayward escapee!

What better way to demonstrate this technique than with my lovely 'poppy' blue sky alpaca yarn, which has arrived in a skein.

First you need to carefully untwist the skein and open it out into a large loop. Then find something to pop this loop over. I tend to use my feet (around the back of a couple of dining chairs works just as well).

Then locate an end, these are often tied to keep them secure, and carefully draw it out and drape it around your thumb with the loose end over the wrist.

Pick up the yarn crossing your palm and begin to wind in a figure of eight around the thumb and first finger, gently freeing more of the skein whenever necessary. Do this about a dozen times.

Now pinch the yarn at the cross in the centre of the 8 and carefully draw it off your hand. Now place the cross onto your fingertip and carefully fold each set of loops around your finger. The loose end should be running down your finger and across your hand. This can be a little fiddly the first couple of times, but you'll soon be a pro.

Now wrap around to secure this. It will need to be 'firm' but not tight. Be sure to keep your loose end free of the newly forming ball at all times.

Once you have a bit more body to work on you can start altering the direction of the winding. Your goal is to create a roughly spherical shape.

At some point you will no longer be able to wind easily with the yarn on your finger. At this point transfer to a large crochet hook, or knitting needle, and carry on! Just be sure to keep your loose end free of the ball.

Eventually you will run out of yarn, tuck the outside end of yarn around some of the later loops to secure it, then remove the ball from the crochet hook and marvel at your creation! Give a tug on the loose end and the yarn will easily unwind from the centre. Enjoy!

Tunisian Blanket, Step 2: Design to Project

This week I'm going to talk through how I turned my blanket design into a 'pattern' and got started on the project. I am by no means an expert at this as it is my first large project. But I'm sure my mistakes will help prevent you lovely readers from doing the same things!

Ordering Materials

This was certainly the main stumbling point for me. I had no yarn in my stash of the same brand that I wanted to use for the blanket - as I decided I wanted something a bit bulkier than the DK bamboo cotton seen in the photos of the last blog. I ended up settling on Drops Paris yarn as it was bulkier, cotton, and I managed to find somewhere I could get it nice and cheap! I knew I would need a large amount of it. So I went ahead and picked the colours I would need and ordered a bunch of yarn.

I had no idea how much I would need. So I just grabbed 10 balls of the blues, and 5 balls of the other colours. Turns out this was nowhere near enough! Luckily when I realised this they still had plenty of stock from the same dyelot so it won't cause any problems.

If you already have a sample of the yarn you are going to use, then you can weigh your gauge swatch (we'll talk about those in a moment) and use it to figure out how much yarn you're going to need. Handy! It's always best to order all your yarn for a project at the same time. Variation between dyelots of the same colour can be enough to make your finished piece look a bit odd.

Materials arriving is always quite exciting. This is actually my second yarn order for this project. It even came in a mesh bag, which is going to be great for storage of future stash items.

Gauge Swatch

This is a really important part of all projects. It helps estimate yarn use, and allows you to check the weight/size of the final fabric. Even when following patterns it's important to do a swatch to make sure your project is going to end up the correct size!

Generally when doing a gauge swatch you would be asked to work up a 10cm x 10cm square and the pattern will indicate how many stitches/rows should be in that square. Many yarns come with this information on their labels - which is really handy.

As I'm making my own pattern, I didn't make a full 10cm gauge. I wanted to know how many stitches/rows would be in each of the graph paper squares on my design, because that's how I'll be working. I did still want to check the weight of the fabric though, so I had to work up a large enough swatch to test that. Using the recommended needle size (5mm) from the yarn as a starting point I worked up a small swatch.

And there it is! All measured up and sitting on top of the blanket. Now, what you can't see is that the blanket is actually worked up using a 6mm hook. The stitch size is almost identical as the 5mm swatch but the fabric is a bit more flexible. Which is what I was going for. I did try to take some photos to demonstrate this, but it really is something you have to 'feel'.

As discussed in the last blog post I know I want each small square of the graph paper on the pattern to be 35mm x 35mm, which means that each grid square will be 6 stitches and 6 rows. Rows on the pictures are fairly self explanatory, and a 'stitch' is the vertical bar and the horizontal loop to the left of it.

I don't own any of those fancy Tunisian hooks with the long piece of piping for very large projects. When I purchased my hooks I wanted something I could carry around easily! Now, there is no way I am going to fit a 2 metre wide blanket on a 30cm long crochet hook. This meant I had to divide my pattern up into strips. Luckily for me this was nice and straight forward. 35cm (ie. 10 grid squares) will fit nicely onto the hooks I have! So I just had to divide up the pattern into 6 strips of 10 grid squares and then crochet them left to right across the pattern. This only becomes relevant when working on the wave motif as the rest of the blanket is just horizontal stripes and will be the same across all strips (that's a bit of a mouthful).

Progress

Hopefully some of you are keen to see how the blanket is coming along. So here's a little pictoral update for you. The first stripe is complete! Here it is laid out on the floor...

... and here is a close up of the wave motif.

Time to start stripe 2!

Next time I'll put together a tunisian crochet primer covering all the techniques I have used in the blanket.

Squares in the Round

Cubes are good. Amigurumi cubes are even better! When I started my first solo Ami I decided I wanted to make a cube elephant (cubephant). I started working up a square in the round in the normal way (3sc in 1 on the corners). But I quickly came across something I didn't like the look of. The corner stripes...

The 3sc in 1 also leaves quite a big hole, and no-one wants to see the stuffing in their Ami. You can see this best if you hold the crochet up to the window.

So I decided to see if I could figure out a way to make a square shape without the big holes and the increase stripes. The way you do this in a circular round is to stagger the increases, then you are never increasing on an increase. This avoids any increase stripes, and also helps the circle stay less angular.

After lots of scribbling out stitch plans and many frogged attempts I managed to get it figured out the way I wanted. Victory!

Because the increases are only 2sc in 1, and alternate location each round, you get a nice even fabric with no stripes. The only downside to this is your square will not be as angular - especially at lower round counts. It's a trade off, angles for stripes and gaps. Here is the second piece held up to the window for comparison.

There are still holes, but they are smaller and irregular. Exactly what I was going for. One last picture of the two pieces side by side and then I will leave the pattern for anyone that wants to have a go.

Pattern

sc= single crochet

inc = increase (2sc in 1 stitch)

1. magic circle 8sc {8 stitches}
2. inc(sc) in all stitches {16 stitches}
3. [2inc, 2sc] repeat 4 times {24 stitches}
4. [4sc, 2inc] repeat 4 times {32 stitches}
5. [sc, 2inc, 5sc] repeat 4 times {40 stitches}
6. [inc, 4sc] repeat 8 times {48 stitches}
7. [3sc, 2inc, 7sc] repeat 4 times {56 stitches}
8. [2sc, inc, 4sc, inc, 6sc] repeat 4 times {64 stitches}

Repeat rows 7 and 8 adding 2sc to the beginning and end of the previous row of the same stitch pattern - e.g. row 9 will be [5sc, 2inc, 9sc] and row 10 will be [4sc, inc, 4sc, inc, 8sc]

Tunisian Blanket, Step 1: Design

I discovered tunisian crochet recently and I am enamored with the pattern and texture of the end fabric. This has resulted in my embarking on an ambitious project to create a blanket that will cover a king size bed. I'll be documenting my progress as I go in the hopes this will provide insight, and a tutorial of sorts, from concept to completed project.

Brace yourselves. Here we go!

Preparation

I was quite inspired for this design, and knew straight away that I wanted to create a blanket with a band of waves at the top. If you aren't sure on what you are going to create yet; have a ramble around the internet, then grab a pen and paper and start brainstorming! If you're making a large blanket, as I am, then a simple design is likely to be more striking (and easier to put into action.)

Once I had an idea I went for a rummage in my yarn stash and had a think about colours. I knew I wanted to do waves, so I grabbed out my blues & greens, and a purple for good measure. Then I grabbed some coloured pens, my pad of graph paper and settled down to start designing.

Making Waves

The first thing I needed to figure out is how to make the shape of the waves I want on the top band. I picked up a black pen, colour isn't important right now, and started to block in the basic motif on the graph paper. Once I had one wave figured out, I drew in a couple more next to it to see how they would look in a row. When I got to 3, I liked how it was looking and decided to use 3 waves across the blanket. Big and bold!

Now I've got a pattern, I need to think about colours. So I started blocking out the wave pattern again, this time using colourful pens! I wanted the lightest colour on top of the wave, and the darkest in the centre. I'm just winging it at this point, and was prepared to have several cracks at it. But I really liked the first design I penned down and decided to continue with that.

Sizing and Stripes

At this point I was ready to start thinking about the blanket as a whole. The first thing I need to think about is the size. I want it to fit a king size bed. So how big are they? A quick google and I'm armed with the dimensions of a standard king size mattress: 180mm X 200mm. Next I'll need to translate this onto the graph paper, how many mm is each of my graph paper squares going to be?

My wave pattern ended up at 55 squares wide. I want to bring this up to a multiple of 10 because it's going to be easier to work with. So I decide to extend it out to 60 (including 1 square of black border on either side). Then I want to figure out how long it's going to be. At this point I'm just worrying about the basic ratio of width:length rather than the specific measurements. 180 divided by 60 is 3. I decided to keep using multiples of 10 on the graph paper and the closest I can get to 200 when multiplying by 3 is to use a length of 70 squares (for 210). If I then make each grid square 35mm x 35mm I'm going to end up with a blanket that is 210mm X 245mm big enough to go over the king size bed (and pillows!) with a bit of overhang.

It's going well! I know the blanket design needs to be 70 squares long. So started extending the black border upwards, making sure the wave band fits onto the top of the blanket how I want it to. Once that is sorted out I can extend downwards to 70 squares total length and create the blanket outline.

I popped a black bar below the wave motif to make sure it's going to really stand out, and then I started considering my options for the main part of the blanket. Stripes are good. I like stripes.

Having decided on stripes I choose to make them non uniform to add a bit of interest. They also give me the opportunity to add in any extra colours I want to, and I do enjoy purple. So I start with a purple stripe! Then I want to move down the wave colours, and include a stripe of the 'background' colour (which will end up being an off-white). At this point I paused again and had a think about how I was going to continue. Who knew stripes could be so complicated!

In the end I decided to reverse the colour order and work back out to purple, and then back into white, and so on. This produces a nice oscillating effect which I think ties in nicely to the 'wave' theme I started out with. I had a couple of spare lines down the bottom, so I put in another band of black just to finish off. Blanket design complete!

Next time we'll take a look at turning the design into a followable pattern and getting started on the project!