Ripple blanket

It's been a while since I had some completed crochet to show you but, at last, my ripple blanket is finished!

Ta-dah! The pattern, of course, is by the lovely Lucy at Attic24. I adapted it slightly by crocheting three rows of colour in each stripe rather than two to make the stripes bolder. The colours were my own choice and I used her method of organised randomness for the order of the stripes. Basically you use your set of colours once and then put them into a different order for the second set, and so on. It really works and is such a simple way to make the colours look spontaneous when your personality is anything but!

The border is made of 3 simple rows (one of trebles and two of double crochet).

The yarn is mostly Stylecraft Special DK which I bought from Black Sheep Wools - luckily they're only a half hour drive from me but they also do mail order. For those who are interested, the colours I used are:

1432 Wisteria, 1390 Clematis, 1084 Magenta, 1061 Plum, 1425 Emperor, 1062 Teal, 1708 Petrol, 1302 Denim, 1019 Cloud Blue, 1203 Silver, 1724 Parma Violet, 1725 Sage, 1068 Turquoise

plus a green, purple and blue from other ranges but I can't find the ball bands to give you those.

I've loved making it and feel a bit bereft now it's finished. I definitely prefer blankets made in rows as there are far fewer ends to sew in! A pity then that my next blanket will be made up of granny circles. Not my choice!

Chickpea saw the Kissing Kaffe design by Amanda Perkins in a magazine and fell in love with it. I think she was expecting to be able to snuggle up in it this winter. Ha, ha! Highly unlikely given it's taken me over a year to make the ripple!

So far I've made 3 circles just trying to get the tension right. Luckily the blanket has lots of circles of different sizes so the ones which were too small won't go to waste. The dark pink will be the prominent colour when it's finished. I'll keep you updated with progress.

More ripples on the local lake. It looked beautiful yesterday in the late afternoon light and this photo really doesn't do it justice.

We were meant to be visiting the Scarecrow Festival at Tatton Park today but the Highways Agency conspired against us. The motorway junction was closed and the diversion took us to another closed junction, whose diversion took us to yet another closed road. We gave up and went home, feeling very fed up. It's still on next weekend but it's a busy one for us so there may not be time. If not, I'll have to content myself with photos from previous years like these from 2016.

Hope you had a lovely and less frustrating weekend! x