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.
No comments:
Post a Comment