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)

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 :-)