Catherine's Crochet Corner

With the New Year came, apparently, a renewed ability not only to crochet but to design.

I cannot express how happy I am about this. A few odd things aside last year, I have felt so inspiration-less for so very long. And of course, looking at the year I had, that’s completely understandable. I’m not beating myself up about it. The fact that I picked up a hook again at all, after losing my baby, was an achievement.

But that said, I am still so happy to be designing again!!

It’s actually a design that has been half-heartedly percolating in the back of my mind for some time. Not in a serious ‘hey, you can design this now’ way, just…a vague idea, an impression of what might be, a sense of ‘at some point you’ll get to the right place for this’. I knew roughly what the blanket wanted to be, and I was certain it was going to be in Highland Heathers, but time and circumstance didn’t collide until quite recently.

But suddenly here it comes. I started as I usually do, which is sketching out the shape and location of the motifs within the blanket (in this case, squares and rectangles). Then I roughly worked out how many different motifs there would be – nine, I think, although that is still somewhat subject to change.

And then I set to work on the prototypes, as I always do, in Special DK in silver. Why silver? I really don’t know. I imagine way back when I began designing my first blanket, the Demelza blanket, that I happened to have a lot of that colour in my stash, so I used it! And I still do, to this day, whenever I’m working on a pattern that will use a DK weight yarn.

As you can see from the pictures, this is a cable blanket – sort of a cable sampler, in fact. I’ve wanted to do a cabled blanket for ages, because it’s just post stitches and as we all know, I adore post stitches. Cables are also not something that a lot of people think of in relation to crochet, and that’s just appalling, because crochet cables are awesome. I’m absolutely loving the motifs I’m working on.

However, that’s not to say it’s necessarily an easy design! The first couple of motifs, I just worked up as I normally do, with a lot of ripping and reworking, all the usual trial and error. And then I realised that a) I don’t trust my maths enough to make sure my repeats fitted into the specified row count, and b) charts are very, very helpful for cables.

So I bought some squared paper and now I’m charting every motif before I start working it up. It’s time-consuming and involves a lot of rubbing out, but it’s definitely making the crochet side of things easier – all I have to do is write up the chart as I crochet it!

I’m nearly two-thirds of the way through designing the motifs, and I’ve picked my colours, so hopefully in a couple of weeks time I’ll be working it up in Highland Heathers and luxuriating in those gorgeous colours.

Meanwhile I am loving working on these gorgeous cables, and I’m loving designing again, and generally I’m feeling like there is light in the world again 🙂

xxx

Catherine