Liberty - Story of a crochet blanket

Liberty was the fifth blanket made for my book Rainbow Crocheted Blankets

It was inspired on a early summer morning's walk along the West Lyn river about half a mile from my home, the river runs through a deep wooded valley and is more of a mountain stream than an actual river.
There aren't really banks as such, just a rocky footpath along the riverside, but there is a small meadow, on that summer morning the meadow sparkled with sunlight, full of wild flowers with the fluffy seeds of Rose bay willow herb blowing in the breeze, it truly was one of those magical moments frozen in time.
I was so inspired that I decided to make a meadow blanket, as I started crocheting I realised that the design looked like a liberty print fabric. My beloved Aunty Pat, sews all her own clothes and makes a lot of them out of Liberty fabric, so Liberty was the perfect name.

Liberty features a green background representing the meadow with rose red hexagonal flowers.

Wip photo's

Finished photo's

This year I gave Liberty to Pat as a birthday present, I'm glad to say she was delighted to be given it and shed a few tears :-)

Arabian Nights - Story of a crochet blanket

Arabian Nights is the sister blanket to Lilian and the fourth one I made for my book Rainbow Crocheted Blankets.
I'm really surprised that it is the book blanket with the most hearts on Ravelry. I love it, but its orange and orange normally doesn't get much love, I wonder if its because I added tassels?

Arabian Nights is inspired by Persian carpets, the orange yarn was dyed with madder which is the orange dye used in antique carpets, madder was also my favourite dye that we used at NDS.
Its earthy, rich and smells like the desert, our madder was grown in Iran which adds an extra something special to the blanket.
It was designed as a child's blanket and inspired by the magic carpet in the Aladdin Disney movie, the Aladdin story comes from a collection of fairy tales called "One Thousand and One Nights", also known as "Arabian Nights".
If I ever have grandchildren its on my list of books to read to them and maybe they'll use it to go on their own magic carpet rides :-)

Wip photo's

Finished photo's

Lilian - Story of a crochet blanket

Lilian is the third blanket for my book Rainbow Crocheted Blankets
Technically Lilian is the first blanket as I started it in December 2013, before I started working on the book, but I stopped working a while when I made the first 2 blankets and then re-started when they were finished.

Lilian was meant to be one of a pair of orange blankets, but I started off with the wrong colours and it ended up with just a few orange motifs.

I love Persian carpets and have a few of my own. These two are my favourites, they are both quite modern but contain elements of traditional design, I didn't want my blanket to be a replica of a carpet design, but I wanted it to have a similar essence.

I chose the name Lilian for 2 reasons, the first is that its the name of a carpet making village in Iran and secondly because Lilian was my mother and she loved colour, especially bright pinks and turquoise, so most of the colours were chosen for her.

Wip

Solstice - Story of a crochet blanket

The second blanket for my book Rainbow Crocheted Blankets is called Solstice, it is the sister blanket to my Crop Circles blanket.
Its named Solstice because I wanted to make it fit in with the Crop Circles blanket inspiration.

The following is it's original description...
"Solstice is named in honour of the summer solstice celebrated at Stonehenge in Wiltshire UK.

Wiltshire is a county in which a lot of UK crop circles appear, especially in the areas around ancient monuments like Stonehenge.

Every year thousands colourful pagans travel to the henge from all over the world, hence the rainbow colours.

Incidentally I’m not one of them, but I love the idea that they are so passionate that they are prepared to travel so far to see a sunrise."

Originally when I started working on the book the plan was to make 14 rainbow blankets, there were going to be 7 sections, 1 for each rainbow colour.
Each section would contain 2 blankets, 1 would be the rainbow colour and the second would be a blanket made out of all the rainbow colours.
The plan didn't last long as I realised that making 14 blankets & writing all the patterns and the rest of the book in 2 years was impossible.
Crop Circles and Solstice are the only 2 blankets that were part of the original plan.

I'll let the photo's tell the rest of the story

Wip photo's

The blanket only took a month to make as its made with DK and I'm a super fast crocheter.

 

This beautiful arty photo is courtesy of Search Press and one of the photo's from the book.

(Don't forget you can find the book HERE in my Etsy shop)