Destination Amanda Perkins - Crochet Colour Wheels

Dear Blog Tour travellers

Its lovely to welcome you here at my destination on Exmoor, North Devon in the UK
Exmoor is a beautiful, wild and windy moor bordering the Bristol Channel in the bottom South West corner of England.

I've thought long and hard about what to write for this special blog post and decided to write it about choosing colours for scrap blankets and colour wheels.
My new book Rainbow Crocheted Blankets comes out in September 2016 and this blog post will hopefully be useful for people who are planning to buy it.
If you are interested in the book and would like more infomation, please sign up for my mailing list, you can find the form in the side bar. 

These days a lot of blanket designs use a specific yarn, but these can work out to be expensive, so to help with cost I try to write my blanket designs as scrap blankets.
Scrap blankets not only help you use some of your existing stash, but can also contain lots of memories of past projects and help you use the precious leftovers of a favourite yarn that you don't want to throw away.
But scrap blankets can also be a bit daunting if you aren't confident with colour, so I've included a bit of colour theory below.

When I'm making a rainbow blanket I base my colours around a colour wheel.
I find a colour wheel a perfect way to experiment.

I start off choosing 3 primary colours.
I prefer to use gold, magenta and cerulean blue for my colour wheel rather than the normal colour wheel colour's, because they make much prettier secondary and tertiary colours.

Then I add the secondry colours in between the primary's.
The secondry colours are a mix of the primary colours for example yellow & blue make green blue & red make purple and red and yellow make orange.

And lastly I add the tertiary colours.

The tertiary colours are a mix of a primary & secondry colour, for example blue & green make blue/green which could be yarns named jade teal, aqua, azure, or yellow & green make yellow/green which could be named lime, chartreuse.

I keep my wheels as samples, as I like to refer back to them and sometimes the colour wheels become something new.

I am running a "Buy one, get one free" offer on all my patterns bought in my Ravelry store.
Simply put 2 patterns in your shopping cart, add the following discount code and you will only have to pay for one of them.
Code - Crochetexpress2016
The offer lasts from now until the 1st of April 2016.

Good luck and have fun :-)
Love Amanda

Twinkle - Pattern of the Week

I love Twinkle, Twinkle, it was the last blanket I made before I embarked on writing my book.
The book has a theme and structure so I had to work within the self imposed guidelines, even though I was really happy and excited to make the book blankets I wasn't totally free to do whatever I wanted and let my inspiration run wild.
So you could say Twinkle was my last burst of freedom before the book, since I finished the book in December I have gone back to following my own path and am completely free to do what I want again :-)

Twinkle is this week's Pattern of the Week
You can find the pattern HERE on Ravelry, don't forget to add the discount code in the photo so you can buy Twinkle at the special price of £2.

Its made up of lots and lots of little triangles that are joined together to make interlocking stars.
I've completely rewritten the pattern and added step by step charts, I have to say drawing the charts made my head hurt, it took a long time to work out how to make them simple enough for a newbie to understand.
I've also added US pattern terms into the actual motif pattern, its the first time I've done it and think its the right thing to do. But it means I now have to go back to all my newly edited patterns and re-edit them again....sigh....

Operation Sea Slug

Since I stopped dyeing yarn last April my dyers muscles have been fading away.

I don't eat a huge amount and most of the time I eat reasonably healthily, but I was beginning to feel like a giant sea slug, I think mainly due to the fact that 50% of my life is spent sitting on a computer chair and the other 50% is spent crocheting on the sofa

I don't think I've put on weight and normally do a small amount of walking, but no where near enough, so I've decided that I need to do more exercise before it's too late.

My cunning plan is to walk the dogs with Phil every night rather than occasionally.

Phil has very long legs and I have very short ones, so for every stride he takes I take 2. I end up staggering along behind him doing a fast walk/slow jog, and I hate it.

But if I force myself to try and keep up with him, eventually in theory I'll get fitter and find it easier.

As yesterday was Sunday we went for a proper walk, instead of a local walk.

We went to Dunkery Beacon which is the highest point on the moor, from where we parked the car it was 3/4's of a mile to the beacon and 3/4's mile back.

It was a glorious sunny day, but very hazy so the views look watery, on a clear day you should be able to see forever.

Catalina comet

As I promised a daily blog post and promptly didn't do anything about I thought I'd better start.

So here is the introduction to my new Catalina Comet blanket.

(All the photos & text have previously been posted on Instagram)

I started crocheting on Tuesday (8/3/16)

This makes me really happy 😃

It's the start of my Catalina crochet blanket and is named after the Catalina comet.

This is Wednesday

This is still making me very happy - 💕😃

And this is yesterday

There's a very subtle colour change going on in this photo, I don't think it's noticeable yet.