Friday 5 October 2012

Wedding Blanket

Heh, maybe I'm not cut out for this blogging lark, I've completely neglected it for months now! Mostly because I haven't been crocheting a great variety of things lately and I've been in and out of the country and in and out of hospital so crochet and blogging have had to take a back seat.

I went to a friend's wedding in Canada a couple of weeks ago, which was great! I decided that making a blanket would be better than buying a present so that's pretty much taken up all my crafting time for the last few months. I didn't manage to finish in time for the wedding and I'm still working on it now but the end is in sight. Right now I'm doing the annoyingly time consuming part of tidying up the squares, sewing the ends in and joining them together. I find this part extremely tedious and will be glad when it's over.

The pattern I used is a free one published by a wool manufacturer and I decided to reward them by making it with their wool (which obviously is why these companies put their free patterns out there in the first place) and I'm pleased with the results. The only change I made to the pattern was swapping out the Vicuna colour for Plum Pudding.

My ravelry project and pattern



The squares use a really cool and simple method to create a ribbed effect, I won't replicate the entire pattern here but I'll describe the ribbing effect as it was the coolest feature and I'm sure it could be adapted and used for other projects.


BPsc: Back-post single crochet—Insert hook from back to front and then to back again around post of stitch, yarn over and draw up loop, yarn over and draw through both loops on hook.
BPhdc: Back-post half double crochet—Yarn over, insert hook from back to front and then to back again around post of stitch, yarn over and draw up loop, yarn over and draw through all 3 loops on hook.
BPdc: Back-post double crochet—Yarn over, insert hook from back to front and then to back again around post of stitch, yarn over and draw up loop, [yarn over and draw through 2 loops on hook] 2 times.
BPtr: Back-post treble crochet—[Yarn over] twice, insert hook from back to front and then to back again around post of stitch, yarn over and draw up a loop, [yarn over and draw through 2 loops on hook] 3 times.
FPdc: Front-post double crochet—Yarn over, insert hook from front to back and then to front again around post of stitch, yarn over and draw up loop, [yarn over and draw through 2 loops on hook] 2 times.


I've used the FPdc to create a nice ribbed granny square...

Start with ch4 & join to make a ring

Rd 1: Ch3 (counts as first dc) 2dc, ch2, {3dc, ch2} 3 times, join with sl st.
Rd 2: Ch2 (counts as first hdc) hdc still working into ch2 corner sp, into each 3dc shell, work FPdc, hdc, FPdc and into each ch2 corner work 2hdc, ch2, 2hdc, finish with 2hdc, ch2 and join in last corner.
Rd 3: Ch2 (counts as first hdc) hdc still working into ch2 corner sp, FPdc around first hdc, *hdc into next hdc, FPdc around next dc*, *-* along each side with 2hdc, ch2, 2hdc in each corner.

Keep repeating this process of adding a new "rib" onto the first hdc on each round and adding two new hdc in the corner and just remember to always work the FPdc around the FPdc of the previous round and work the hdc's into the hdc's of the previous rounds.

And here's how it looks...