How does being bored with knitting plain socks on the train turn into an afternoon designing a blanket?
Here’s how…
I sat asking myself, “What can I knit on the train that’s not socks?”
Squares for a blanket maybe?
Out came my two Debbie Abrahams blanket books.
These two…
I made my Denim Blankie from one of these books – the one that hangs over my bed – they’ve been faves ever since.
After much deliberation and work with a calculator I decided it was going to be expensive! Maybe my excessive stash could yield some yarn to ease the cost?
I rummaged, I “stash dived” (“stash dove”??), I emerged, gasping, from under the bed with three bags full of Jaeger Matchmaker DK that I snapped up in a sale a couple of years ago. Ten balls of each of these colours….
Ooohhhh! That says “Flower Power” to me!!
The Flower Power pattern in”Blankets and Throws to Knit” uses 40 balls of Rowan Wool cotton in 8 different colours.
Like this…
I didn’t want anything quite that colourful plus I had been previously been “Wowed” by Minxxy’s blue and white version of Flower Power. I kinda liked the “restrained palette” idea.
Hmmmm…How do I get three colours into an eight colour blanket? I am wise enough to know, especially after seeing how carefully the Denim Blankie pattern was laid out, that just doing random squares and hoping it would look OK wasn’t going to work for me. I am way too structured in my thinking to be able to tolerate an unbalanced, higgledy piggledy blanket.
Anyone who works with me knows, I’ll try and bend any problem into an opportunity to play with drawing pictures in Visio ( PC diagramming software).
So I sat and drew…
I drew stripy squares, plain squares and flowery squares….
I coloured them in every possible combination of the three colours….
I arranged them, confused myself, swore a bit and rearranged them….
I made Ben come and look…
“Ermmm, Honey….You’ve been working on this for ages – shouldn’t you save it?” Said Ben.
Phew – One clumsy lumbering ginger cat and it could have been lost!! 🙂
Relax! It’s saved now!!
Want to see what I came up with?
The pattern is the same dimensions as the original blanket – 9×13 squares but I’m not sure if I’ll have enough wool. I’ll make vertical strips of 9 squares and hopefully it’ll not be obvious if I have to stop – that’s one of the reasons I decided on a straight forward, repeating pattern and not a complex “centered” one like Debbie Abrahams often does (Who an I kidding – this was hard enough – I don’t have her talent!!)
Here’s the breakdown of the square’s I’m going to need if I do the entire blanket…
You’ll notice that there’s 6 different flowers – there were 8 in the original pattern! I will play with the flowers a little, basing them on Debbie’s designs from the book. At least with my plan I can see what the main background and petal colours need to be.
Watch this space for flower fun… 😀
It looks lovely! I think that sticking with a restricted colour range will be very effective. I shall watch your progress with interest. Debbie is coming to do a workshop near me in October – I think I shall get myself booked in asap!
How funny, I’m using squares from Flower Power as well for my Blanket in a Year knit along group on Ravelry (http://www.ravelry.com/groups/a-year-in-a-blanket). I’m using Elle Elite, though I’m adding squares from other books and doing a big cabled panel up the middle. I shall watch your progress to see how different your flower power inspired blanket looks to mine.
I love it! Have you noticed that you’ve done a square wrong in your design? 😉 It’s a grey stripey one, 3rd column from the left, 5th square down. I wouldn’t want your carefully designed blanket to have one mismatched square!
Aberdonian
Gasps!!! 😯
You’re absolutely right!!
Fortunately I only need to rotate that by 90 degrees… I’m impressed you’re looking so closely!
Thanks for the heads up 🙂
oh I love the colours and will be looking forwards to the progress as it comes ☻
That looks lovely! I can’t wait to see the squares as they immerge.
It looks super – I’m looking forward to your progress reports!
Hi, this blanket is so gorgeous I have been inspired to try the cushion version (for starters). I’m not very experienced with the intarsia technique, and have reached a problem… For the separate petals did you carry the yarn across the back or use a different piece for each new bit? ie did you use just one bit of yarn for each flower or separate strands when dealing with 2 petals? I hope this makes sense, it’s harder to describe than I thought!
thanks
Hi Alison
I used separate yarn for each petal – wound on separate bobbins. There are a couple of places you can get away with carrying it but it’s a trickier shape than it first looks. My advice is to have lots of bobbins and add and take away yarns quite freely. If you cary too much it can pull tight and you can’t correct it. With lots of loose ends to darn in (!) you get a chance to wiggle all the stitches tighter or looser as you darn them in.
Also – for some of the fiddlier stitches around the edges of petals – it’s worth just Swiss embroidering them! (I like to cheat 🙂
Have you tried googling intarsia techniques – there’s a lot of good stuff out there to help you??
Good luck and happy knitting
Susan
After research a number of of the weblog posts on your website now, and I actually like your manner of blogging. I bookmarked it to my bookmark web site listing and might be checking again soon. Pls take a look at my web site as nicely and let me know what you think.