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!