SQ Blog

Cornucopia blanket by Amanda Perkins September 30 2015, 0 Comments

This fruity beauty is the work of crochet designer, Amanda Perkins (of Natural Dye Studio fame).

Amanda is now a full-time designer, specialising in blankets.

Amanda explains that Cornucopia came about through a desire to explore the effect of subtle tonal and saturated colour in the same blanket.

She started with a skein of bright yellow Skein Queen Selkino and added extra colours that worked together from what she had to hand. The effect was a fruit bowl of cherries, oranges, limes, strawberries, apples, mangos and kiwis, so she named it after the mythological “Horn of Plenty” which overflows with fruits and flowers.

Amanda sent me these sample colours to match in a variety of her preferred SQ yarns - Lustrous, Selkino, Luminosity and Flockly.

And here's the result:

These yarn bundles (with handy cotton tote bag) are now available for pre-order in the online shop and the Cornucopia pattern is available here.

It was lovely working with Amanda and great to see her design career go from strength to strength now that she has the time to spend on getting her ideas into crochet form.


A finished blanket!! March 22 2014, 0 Comments

Until today, I've never finished a knitted or crocheted blanket - well, not a full-size adult one.

And look - I'm wiping tears of pride away as I show you. Squares that haven't become cushions, or chair covers, or anything else. It's a real-life blanket.

 

The story of this blanket starts a while back. I'd wanted to crochet a granny square-type blanket with a white border for a long time, having seen Flowers in the Snow and lots of examples in Mollie Makes Home magazine (does that magazine still exist?)

Back in January, myself and alabamawhirly went to visit thatcanadian in Cambridgeshire. We'd been messaging back and forth that she'd bought a load of Noro Kureyon from Tangled Yarn to make a blanket inspired by Beata's one here. When we arrived, she'd made a few squares and said how quickly they were working up and that they kept your interest because of the colour changes of the Noro.

That was it. I was "hooked" (forgive me the pun, I'm ill!)

I thought if I was going to finish a blanket, it was going to be this one. So I bought my Noro in batches of five balls (y'know, just in case). Each ball worked up about four squares. And I sailed through them, watching the colours change as I went. I wasn't precious about how the colours were working out or the odd colour jolt - the white evens them all out in the end.

I used a Clover Soft Touch crochet hook size 4 from Natural Dye Studio which was a bit easier on the hands than previous ones I'd used.

For the border, I found a big cone of Aran BFL (as you do) in the workshop and it worked perfectly. But it did take a long time to put one row of trebles round each square. Then I finished off with a single border of double crochets.

It needs blocked but my daughter has requisitioned it as the new sofa blanket.

And I hope it lasts for many years to come.

I wonder what knitting will feel like now...