Crown Glass
Equipment and Yarn
I’ve long loved tonally variegated yarn but never quite knew what to do with it. It doesn’t look right used alone in crochet and yet clashes horribly with other variegated yarns. The colour scheme of this blanket came into being as I stared shamedly at my pile of hand-dyed yarn and contemplated the fact that I had an utterly unseemly amount of yarn purchased on the simple basis of “Oh, pretty”.
Using it as an accent colour with a plain yarn is surprisingly effective. I had 12 balls of Scheepjes Organicon in Oat Bath which is a stunning, almost caramel colour. I selected 5 skeins of 4ply merino yarn from Pigment and Ply in vaguely complementary colours using the theory of “sisters not twins”.
Out of the 500 grams of variegated yarn I used 280 grams and all 12 balls of the complementary cotton yarn. I know mixing fibres is controversial (due to the stretch factor mostly and how it behaves in the wash) but frankly it turned out beautifully and washes perfectly well. I will certainly do this again.
In total I used 1,900 metres of the plain yarn and 1,120 metres of the variegated yarn.
This blanket would be an ideal stashbuster of those scrappy bits of hand dyed yarn we all seem to hoard and would be a perfect use of the advent calendar yarns which are so temptingly easy to buy and so difficult to use.
I used a 3mm hook throughout and a gauge square of the Bullseye pattern worked to 10cm x 10cm.