Flower Power - Story of a crochet blanket

This week's featured blanket from my book Rainbow Crocheted Blankets is Flower Power.

Flower Power is the sister blanket to Liberty, it uses the same motif.
As Liberty was inspired by the fabrics my aunt used I thought it was only right I made a blanket inspired by fabrics my mother (her sister) used.
My mother worked for Singer Sewing Machines and made her own clothes all her life, in later life she was a big Laura Ashley fan and when she died we found a cupboard full of Indian saris she had bought and hidden away to use to make into dresses.
But I have chosen to design the blanket around fabrics I remember as a very small child, I was born in the 1960's and grew up through the 1970's,
I remember big bold simple flower prints using a lot of green, orange and brown, a colour combination I'm not very fond of, so I've swapped the brown for a dusky pink and violet.

WIP photo's

Finished photo's

Severn Sea & Scrumptious Bubbles

This week's blog post was going to be the story of my Flower Power book blanket, but as I published 2 new blanket patterns this week I thought they needed a blog post first.

So here they are.....

Severn Sea
It was inspired by a combination of John Arbon Textiles Knit by Numbers yarn and the Bristol Channel which is the sea I live next to.
John's Knit by Numbers is very cleverly spun, he has a collection of base colours, each colour has a range of 6 different shades which run from the dark base colour and get paler each new shade.
You can find more information about it HERE
My blanket is made with 4 ply, but the pattern contains yarn amounts and measurements for a DK version.
In Tudor times the Bristol Channel was called the Severn Sea, which is a much more romantic name and also more descriptive, as our coastline is on the edge of the Atlantic Ocean.
If you swam directly west about 2,200 miles you would end up in Canada :-)
The blanket was designed to reflect the shape of waves and colours of the sea.

You can find the pattern HERE on Ravelry.

 

Scrumptious Bubbles

The second blanket was made with the same motif design and made using Fyberspates Scrumptious 4 ply, you can find a list of stockists HERE
Last year Jeni asked me to choose some new colours which would fit into the Scrumptious 4 ply range, the colours came out this summer and of course I had to test them all.
I absolutely love working with Scrumptious as its soft and has a big percentage of silk. I firmly believe that silk is the perfect seasoning for yarn, as it complements the shine and drape of a wool yarn.
You can find a small selection of the colours used HERE in my Etsy shop
The bubbles part of the name ties it in with the Severn Sea blanket as the circles could be rainbow sea foam.
You can find the pattern HERE on Ravelry.

Happy Christmas "Buy 1 get, 1 free" offer.

As its the 1st of December I thought I'd offer you a discount code, so you have plenty of crochet to keep you busy over Christmas.

Use the code in my Ravelry store, add two patterns to your cart, add the following code at checkout and you will only have to pay for one. The offer includes all my patterns, including the books.
The code is Christmas2016 and you can find my Ravelry store HERE
The offer will run from now until January 1st 2017.