Mirage - Story of a Crochet Blanket

Mirage is the 8th blanket in my book Rainbow Crocheted Blankets, which you can find in my Etsy shop - HERE

Mirage is a re-make of a quilt I made in the 1990’s, called Reflection of a Mirage, which was originally inspired by historical Turkish/Islamic city maps. 
The centre panel of the blanket depicts the reflection of a desert city, I can’t remember why there was a reflection, but as I love the way the shapes fit together I decided to stick to the original name and design.

The base colour is turquoise and fits into the rainbow as a replacement for blue, for me turquoise is the colour of the Mediterranean and works nicely with orange which is the colour used in Persian carpets, which also form part of the inspiration.

Most of the yarn is John Arbon Textiles Knit by Numbers DK, its a beautiful soft snuggly yarn to work with and the turquoise was perfect for my blanket.

Wip photo's

Finished photo's

Photo courtesy of Search Press.

This is my favourite photo of the book, because of the chickens. They are Buff Orpingtons, We had some Buffs about 10 years ago, they were much loved cuddly pets rather than useful egg laying chickens. 

They loved to eat rose petals and would gather around my rose bushes jumping to eat the petals from the flowers, they also purred if I gave them custard cream biscuits, sadly they were killed by a fox, 

One day I hope to have some more....

Maisy, Mabel, Gladys, Doris and Betty.

Plus Minnie, Mouse and Ethel, 2 Pekins and a Maran in the background.

Knot Garden - Story of a crochet blanket

Firstly let me say HAPPY NEW YEAR, I know its been a bit late, but I've been up to my neck in all the admin that I put off till "later". Later finally caught up with me and I decided the new year was a good time to clear the decks.

Onto Knot Garden, which is featured in my book Rainbow Crocheted Blankets, its sold out almost everywhere, but I still have a few copies left in my Etsy shop HERE
The book is being reprinted and will hopefully be back in stock in all the normal places shortly.

Knot Garden was inspired by a quilt I made about 25 years ago, as I loved the geometric patterns of Tudor knot gardens and I wanted to try out some mitred squares it was the perfect place to start.
I had no end of problems with getting the right colours and frogged and frogged and frogged again.
The edging on the flower beds is a little bit too dark, but I had to stop frogging or I would still be dithering nearly 2 years later :-)
So here are the photo's

WIP photo's

Billy doing his comfort quality control test :-)

Finished Photo's

Thank you to Search Press for allowing me to use this photo from the book.