Finally!  I have finished my sweat pea blanket and I did try to finish it in time to enter into my local flower show craft section, but, I am afraid my fingers were just too sore to keep the tension in the yarn so my border went a bit wavy.  Although this one was not good enough to enter, I entered my Cosy autumn coloured stripe blanket instead.  Woo-hoo, it got first place in the crochet and knitted section.  So that, along with my paintings and a photograph of snails on a wall, got me the Handicraft trophy.  I won’t be attempting any more large blankets but I may do some smaller Granny blankets instead as they are a bit easier and won’t take quite so long to accomplish.  I will now be getting my paints out again – maybe I will just play about with art journalling to get me in that mindset and playing with pens and paints before they all dry up.

I just love the muted bright colours in this blanket.  I can’t tell you how many times I ripped it back when I found I had made mistakes but I finally got there in the end and just before we had that nasty cold weather.  Lucy over at Attic24 has a fab tutorial on how to make this lovely blanket with lots of pictures.  I think I have now got the crochet bug so I will do small projects often to make sure I don’t forget what I have learned.

My first attempt at a Granny blanket.  Many years ago my auntie Lena gave me a small Granny blanket which had become so well used that it was rather tatty and full of hole so I thought at first I could maybe mend it but it a lot of the threads were almost bare so I sought out a pattern that looked fairly easy and gave it a go.   I actually started it a few years ago but gave up because crocheting hurt my shoulder and I just couldn’t get to grips with it at all.  But I still had all the wool just lying in a bag so I gave it another go and this time I cracked it.  I made the squares using the tutorial on lovely Lucy’s blog over at Attic24 then added a wide border. The problem with leaving a project for a couple of years is that when you run out of your favourite shade of wool you find that the makers have either discontinued that colour or you get a different dye lot and the shades don’t quite match-up.  I also found that if I kept my right elbow touching the top of my wheelchair tyre then I am less prone to lifting my shoulder up therefore I got less pain.  I don’t remember where I got the border idea from but I think it goes like this:  for the 1st pink, yellow, green and mauve borders it was just 3 treble cluster chain 1, until the corner then chain 2 in between 2 treble clusters for the corners.  I liked it so much that I went on to make a bigger cosy blanket again using one of Lucy’s tutorials.  The 1st white part of the border is: 1 dc into the chain space then ch3,  all around.  Stay with white and 3 dc into the chain spaces ch1, all around followed by a row of all dc.  The dark purple is dc then ch3, pink row is  3tr ch1.  Yellow dc ch3. Maroon is 3tr ch1.  Mauve dc ch3.  Green 3tr ch1.  White dc ch3.  Blue 3tr ch1. Pink dc ch3.  White  3tr ch3.  Green dc ch3.  Pink 3tr ch1.   Blue dc ch3.  Last row Maroon 3tr ch1.