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)

Crop Circles - story of a crochet blanket

In January 2014 I started working on my new book Rainbow Crochet Blankets (also called Rainbow Crocheted Afghans for the US market).
You can find the UK version HERE in my Etsy shop.

The first blanket was Crop Circles, as the book was based on the rainbow I thought I'd start with yellow, which was not a colour I use very often. I made the blanket out of NDS yarn, dyed with Fustic and Cutch which created a lovely corn field yellow.
NDS yarn is discontinued, but Drops Alpaca do an almost perfect colour match called Goldenrod.
As the yellow was corn field yellow I didn't need to search very hard for inspiration, I've always been fascinated crop circles, I love the fact that someone has created interesting and complex designs on such a large scale in the landscape, but I doubt that farmers feel the same way.

The photo's below tell the story of my Crop Circles blanket progress.

I started off trying to master making a crochet circle, you would not believe how difficult I found making a crochet circle that laid flat, I searched the internet for circle patterns and tutorials. I swatched and swatched and swatched, my circles were either curled at the edge or had corners and flat sides, eventually I tweaked the basic pattern to come up with a perfect circle.

And so my circle/square obsession began :-)

For some reason I decided to make a king sized blanket, I quickly realised that it was a stupid idea as I'd never get 10 large blankets finished within my deadline, but as I'd already started crocheting I decided to carry on and make Crop Circles to its intended size.

It took me 3 months, but I loved the result, so much so that I decided Crop Circles was going to be my blanket and to put it on my bed when all the photographs had been taken.

Its impossible photographing such a massive blanket, its just too big to be able to see the design.

But even though my publishers Search Press focused on artistic photos rather than photo's on the entire blanket, they have done an amazing job and I think they've done it justice.

Thank you Search Press :-)

Giveaway prize draw

I've decided to do a Give away prize draw :-)

Entry is very simple, all need you to do to enter is own a copy of my book, it doesn't matter which version it is, either the UK Rainbow Crocheted Blankets or the US Rainbow Crocheted Afghans and leave an honest review on Amazon.

If you don't own a copy yet, you can buy from one of the links below, you can also find signed copies of the UK terms version in my Etsy shop - HERE

Once you have left your review, comment on this post or let me know on any of my social networking sites, Instagram, twitter or Facebook, or even send my an e-mail HERE

You can find Rainbow Crocheted Blankets here on AMAZON UK
And Rainbow Crocheted Afghans here on AMAZON US

The prize is a copy of my Foxgloves blanket booklet, a skein of yummy Fyberspates Scrumptious 4 ply and a pack of postcards.

Entries close on the 1st of November 2016.

Happy reviewing
Love Amanda

Websites

I've had a website in some form or another since the early days of the internet in 1999.
All of them self built, I'm very proud of the fact that my new years resolution for 2000 was to build my own site and I achieved my goal 3 months early :-)
A lot has changed since 1999, I've used 4 different site providers, which have developed and become far more sophisticated since 1999, I remember having to contact the first site provider every time I edited, as they were the ones who published the pages.

My latest site was built in a hurry, due to the fact I had a big article written about me in Landscape magazine. The article was due to come out in April 2016, but was actually published a couple of months earlier. I wasn't informed of this until 2 weeks before the due date and so ended up panic building.
Ever since then I have been far too busy to find the time to finish it and tidy it up.
But now Yarndale is over, my book is published and I'm in a lull between finishing and writing blanket patterns. I finally have the time, which is a good thing because the site is the only one mentioned on all my marketing material.
The site still isn't completely finished, I still need to add the blankets, samples and Fybespates yarn to my Etsy shop, which is my main storefront at the moment.
When I have a bit more time I'll add a website shop to the site and move everything over to it, but for the time being its ok and I'm fairly happy with the way it works and looks.

What do you think?
(click on the photo below to take you to the site)