Finished - Yarn Fairy Blanket

RRGGGHWWARRGGELLELEOOOAAAARRGGH!!!

That’s what goes through my head when I realise that I have a finished object on my hands. It’s basically a series of sounds – whooping and hollering with some shrieking thrown in for good measure.

The noises increase to fever pitch levels when I do a photoshoot with said finished object – when it is laid out in all its finished glory while a snap away like a craft obsessed David Bailey.

And so I (and my head noises) would like to present to you...

My finished ripple blanket.

 
*pause for shrieking excited noises*

I can’t remember the exact date I started it, some point in the Easter holidays, I think possibly Easter Monday and finished on 30th June. So about 2 months to complete. To be honest it would have been finished much quicker but I kept having to put it down to cross stitch Christmas cards and make mobiles and stitch babygros and start albums of holidays in France.

(Ooh actually I’ve been quite crafty over the past couple of months. Well done me.)

Who would have thought that at the beginning of this year I couldn’t ripple at all? Who remembers the spitting out of the dummy and the wails of “I’m never going to be able to do this! I hate rippling!” and blaming it all on being left handed (not a card I pull out often but I find it does occasionally work well).

I think that, and it pains me to say this, the problem was just that I wasn’t concentrating very hard on that initial foundation chain and making sure I was counting properly. I’ve always struggled with counting. It’s because I’m left handed. No? Can’t use it there either? Damn....

But whatever the problem, it’s now sorted and I am a rippling machine. I increase and decrease with the greatest of ease and there was only a couple of times where there was a bit of swearing and frogging of a row because I’d forgotten to decrease or stuck an extra increase in somewhere.

There is one major drawback to rippling versus my beloved granny squares though and that’s do with transportation. Granny squares are good to take away with you somewhere because you just have to shove your balls of wool in somewhere and you can easily build some stacks of grannies. When you’re rippling though, it’s only really transportable in the early stages, soon it gets pretty big and unwieldy and it’s just not possible to take with you places. That was pretty annoying.

This blanket is destined to be a summer blanket. My vision is that I can go to a park and take it with me and lay all my stuff out on it and not get grass stains on my bum. And make people jealous.

The reason why I love this blanket? Because it’s a special Yarn Fairy blanket. I didn’t buy any of the wool myself for this blanket, it all came from the Yarn Fairy. You may remember she visited me on my birthday, coming in 2 guises, as Heather from Little Tin Bird and also as my Mum’s friend Lorraine. As luck would have it, all the colours went together (obviously not luck, the Yarn Fairy knew what she was doing!) and I set about rippling away.

At one stage I wasn’t sure if I was going to buy another set of balls and carry on rippling but I decided that I would keep this purely as a Yarn Fairy Blanket, made just from what she had given to me. Also it turned out that by the time I was getting to the end of the yarn, I felt the blanket was big enough to sit on in the park.

It’s been an exercise in colour bravery for me as well. As I’ve mentioned before my natural instinct is to fall into creating patterns. Random is a dirty word in my brain. Order is where it’s at. But I knew it wouldn’t be right for the Yarn Fairy Blanket so I forced myself to be random. Kind of. I built it up in sets, taking all the wool and working out what order I would use them, then do the same thing again, making sure I wasn’t putting the wool in the same order as before. It was good, it was a way of combining my need to be organised with a need for the blanket to look good. Everyone loves a bit of compromise.

I desperate want to make an awful crochet pun about being hooked on rippling but I’m reigning myself in.

But oh look at this! I appear to be rippling again already...addictive.

Just in case you wanted to know stats about the yarn – here you go:

Special by Stylecraft
1061 – Plum
1019 – Cloud Blue
1084 – Magenta
1188 – Lavender
1034 – Sherbet
1083 – Pomegranate

Life DK by Stylecraft
2359 – Melon
2346 – Mixtures blue haze
2357 - Aqua