Yesterday's square of my crochet blanket

Ok so, I know I said that the squares of my "mood" blanket were to be random - this is mostly the case but occasionally I do feel that some things should be added that mean something.

Yesterday was my Gran's funeral.

So in her memory I added a special square to my blanket.

This one is knitted again as the one a few weeks ago was and again in white for the same reason, however yesterday was a time to remember all of the happy times that everyone had spent with Gran. One of my biggest memories of her from when I was a small child was her baking. As well as knitting, she was a fabulous traditional cook and her cakes were some of the best that I have ever tasted. My favourite's were always her butterfly cakes.

If you're not too sure and my wonderful knitted attempt to replicate it isn't self explanatory enough then these are cup cakes where after they are cooked, the top is cut from the top of the cake. This little bit that is removed is then cut in half, whipped cream and jam added to the top of the cake and the two little pieces of sponge stuck back in to form wings on the top of the cake.

I started off knitting my cake with a pattern that I found on Ravelry. This worked for the cupcake case and the start of the sponge but then unfortunately I was on my own for the rest of the pattern. I wasn't too sure where to go from there so I just sort of made it up as I went along - I tried to keep the cake part the right shape and then added a blob of cream and finally a blob of jam to the top. I knitted up a couple of "wings" separately and then sewed these to the back as if they had been squidged into the cream.

It's perhaps not the most perfect little cake in the world - the real thing made by my gran would have tasted much nicer! - but as this is the first time I have ever tried to make up my own knitting pattern then I am quite proud of this one.

Here's another update of how my blanket is looking at the minute

It's starting to look ever so slightly more like a blanket and less like a scarf than it was doing.

My Mum brought this over for me a few days ago - it was one of the few remaining possessions that my Gran had in her nursing home room at the end. Her knitting bag. It's nice to see that my Gran's love of knitting never really ended even when she wasn't capable of picking up her needles. A lovely bag, with her knitting pattern file and a folder full of needles in there too.

 Some of the patterns are really old fashioned and I don't really remember anyone wearing these. My Mum said that she can remember some of them though.

 There are also a few in here that I know I was made as a child. I definitely remember this one and there being a picture of little me on Gran's wall for years of me wearing it.

 And this is the pattern for the ballet cardigan that I had as well. I don't think that this one will ever go out of date!

I love looking through all of these kinds of things. It's amazing what memories can be gained from a folder of old knitting patterns!

I really love this and feel truly privileged to have been given this to look after. It's something that I think I will always keep and will be treasured in my craft room forever.

Crochet "Mood" Blanket

Good morning all,

Long time no speak. I am going to (over time) try to catch up with posting all of my recent crafty makes as I am very aware that it has been over 2 months since I last blogged.

Everything has been far too busy recently and I have had a lot of work done on my house so I haven't really been able to get to my computer very comfortably.

The first thing therefore that I thought I would share with you as it is possibly the most time-relevant thing is my crochet "mood" blanket.

I am not sure if you will have seen a group going around on Facebook for this but the basic gist of the rules are that you are to crochet one square per day (or week if you choose) and add this to a blanket. The rules also state this this should be based on how you are feeling on that day however I am being a bit rebellious and not really sticking to this one.

A little while ago I bought a pack of yarn. (You may remember I blogged about it at the end of June in this post.) It is the multi-coloured pack you see here. I have been saving this for a while as I knew i wanted to make a blanket with it and thought that it would be a granny square one but wasn't really too sure where to start or how to do it.

I decided that this "mood" blanket was a good idea so this is the beginnings of where the idea for my blanket is coming from.

I wasn't sure about the whole mood idea of the blanket for a year as I wasn't entirely sure I would be able to allocate a different mood to each colour of yarn that I have. I don't think I'm that moody!!! Ok so that's a bit of a lie but I'm not sure that I really do have that many different emotions that are likely to be fairly different each day. I feared that mine would end up with Monday to Friday being the colour for "bored" being at work, Saturday would be white for my ski instructing that I do or a couple of colours for "busy" and "chilled" depending on how the day had gone and my Sunday therefore would be the only day that might be slightly different depending on who we saw or what I ended up doing on that day.

Out of the 21 colours that I showed you in this picture from June...

...I realised that I had a couple that were duplicates. I received 5 balls of the blue colour that is on the top and there are also two pinks and two of the same lighter yellow within the packs as well.

I have decided therefore that I will not use the blue - I have some plans for a possible cardigan or hoodie type jacket to make in the blue and I have saved the yellow and pink in case I do not have enough of the remaining other colours to edge the blanket nicely at the end of the year. I have just had a thought that I might also be able to use these on my "special" squares that you will see below. I'll have to wait and see how much yarn I have left.

Ok so so far I had decided that I was making a blanket by adding a square each day but the colours would be completely random…ok maybe there should be slightly more meaning to some of the squares than just a random colour so here is where the next plan came in.

365 is a really stupid number to try to use to make a blanket as there are very few numbers that it divides by (here comes the maths nerd bit!) so I decided that if I were to make a 20x20 square blanket then this would need 400 squares (or at least the equivalent of) so my idea was to add a larger square for "special" days. These will symbolise the thing that they are to represent.

I tried a number of ways of arranging the days of the year so that I could include the special days having larger squares and still keeping them in the correct order for the date that they represent. This is the best option that I came up with:

I am going to go backwards and forwards with my days - the larger squares on the design above will be my "special" squares.

Here is the progress of my blanket as the days have gone along. This one shows the squares up to up to day 15's square and with the colour chosen for day 16.

On January 14th my Gran sadly passed away. As she was the lady who taught me to knit - she absolutely loved knitting, it was rare to see her without her needles going - I thought it would be nice to represent her in my blanket by adding a knitted square for her. This day I did choose the colour - white for peace as she is peaceful now.

The rest of my squares up to the end of January have been random colours again for each day. The only rule I have made for these is they must not repeat with the previous day's or the square above now that I am going back along the row.

I love the way that this is coming along - and the progress that is made each and every day. One square is often just enough to give me something to do each day and whenever I feel I need more then there are always other projects that I can do to keep me going.

I'll make sure that I come back really soon to update you with some of the other things that I have been making.