Monday 10 October 2016

Planning the next blanket

It was great to finish the blanket I blogged about in my last post, but I do enjoy having a longer term project on my needles or hooks so that I can pick it up or leave it alone as the mood takes me.  Time to plan the next blanket project, then!

This one will be a crochet blanket. again at least single bed size.  Loving Hands received a wonderful donation of coned yarn from Nicola a few months ago, and in my share I have some beautiful colours.  I was especially taken with this cone of variegated yarn:


It is 4 ply superwash pure wool, and I love the range of greens and browns in it.  Among the cones I found some greens and a brown which echo its colours.  I also picked out an oatmeal shade, primarily for joining and the border.  So my blanket planning currently looks like this:


The pale green at the top is 2 ply yarn with alpaca, the brown and oatmeal are 4 ply acrylic and the rich teal is a 4 ply acrylic and wool mix.  As you can see, the variegated cone is considerably smaller; there is only 250g of that while the others are 400 or 500g.  The 4 ply yarns will be crocheted doubled, but a small trial showed that I would need 3 strands of the 2 ply to get the same size squares.

The next question is, what shall I put with the variegated yarn?  If I crochet it doubled, I won't get many squares from it.  I have done a test square with one strand of oatmeal, but it seems to hide the richness of the multicoloured yarn.  These are my test squares so far:


What do you think?

I'm going to try a couple of other combinations and see what results I get.  I really want to showcase this lovely yarn, not swamp it with its background colour.  I'll keep you posted!