1st December 2025

As the oft repeated adage goes, using yarn and buying yarn are two entirely different hobbies. Every yarn collection seems to contain at least one ball of practically unusable yarn, everyone has a weakness somewhere. An inexplicable fondness perhaps for mohair, novelty yarn, gradients sold in 2000 metres balls of laceweight masquerading as 4ply that I have no patience for whatsoever and of course my own weakness, variegated hand dyed yarns.

I'm a sucker for them. If you were to follow me around a yarn festival you'd hear a constant low buzz of "you have 8lbs of unusable hand dye in shades of mucky green already, you do not need more" from under my breath as I try (and fail) to walk past stalls.

Last year I decided I was not going to be a slave to my sad mucky green impulses and I was going to use the yarn. The problem is that variegated yarn really does not suit crochet. Knitted items in variegated yarns look amazing be they socks, shawls or jumpers They even look great in Stephen West's more outrageous designs! I suspect this might be to do with the way the colours pool in the smaller stitches of knitting as crochet items in linen stitch look glorious.

Back in 2022 I made a Charlotte's Universe by Dedri Uys for a beloved headteacher who was retiring from my children's school and wanted to use the finest yarn I owned which happened to be some lovely bluey-green variegated yarns from Third Vault Yarns. It looked horrific until I started mixing in some plain beige cotton 4ply, then magic began to happen. Alas the magic didn't happen in my yarn stash though, that's as out of control as ever.

To tackle my yarn stash I designed my own blanket - the Crown Glass blanket - which utilises the same colour plan as my Charlotte's Universe blanket did. It's an excellent stash buster as it mixes 5 shades of variegated yarn with a plain caramel coloured yarn in a way that showcases the hand dyed yarn without it being overwhelming. Whilst making it I realised that given the amounts of yarn used it would work really well with advent calendar yarns.

That brings us to today - I have expanded my horizons and bought Pixie Yarn's 2024 Mendip quarterly club of 24 x 20g yarns with the plan to use it to make another Crown Glass blanket and because I am foolish I have challenged myself to make it over the advent period. As if I wasn't already busy enough. Do please follow along to see how I do and if you too have a mountain of variegated yarns or a stash to rival mine (of course you do) the pattern is freely available here ... Crown Glass

Here's day 1, the first of 16 octagons. Hopefully I'll see you tomorrow with day 2!