Operation Sea Slug - The Foreland

I'm still walking with Phil everyday or rather still staggering along behind him trying to catch up. Some nights I really don't enjoy it, such as tonight when it was wet & cold & dark. 

But some walks make up for the cold, dark, wet ones, such as last Sunday's walk.

We went up to the top of Countisbury Hill, overlooking the Foreland, it's one of my favourite places as the views are always amazing even when it's raining. 

It's also one of my favourite blanket shoot locations.

On Sunday it was bathed in soft late afternoon light.

 

Looking east towards Porlock and beyond, if you look closely you can see the moon rising.

Looking north across the Severn Sea (Bristol Channel) towards Wales.

 

And looking south towards the moor.

Pattern of the Week - Lecchi crochet blanket

This week's pattern is Lecchi.
You can find it on Ravelry HERE

In 2012 we went on holiday to Italy with our very dear friends Fyberspates & Chester Wool, we stayed in a village called Lecchi.

I had taken my current project and as much yarn as I could physically fit into the car, while sitting, relaxing under olive & pine trees in the Tuscan sun I decided that I didn't like what I was working on so started playing with colour and triangles.

 

 

It didn’t take long for me to realise that the very simple triangle I was mindlessly playing with had huge potential, the colours glowed in the dappled sunlight and I loved the way they fitted together. I spent the rest of the holiday making triangles out of the colours I had, it took us 3 days to drive home and when I wasn’t driving I was sitting crocheting with a lap full of orange and pink triangles. 

In fact I loved the triangles so much that Lecchi became the first pattern in my Madder Triangles e-book.

Lecchi was first published in the very first edition of Simply Crochet, I was really proud to see it on the very first cover.

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....