The long awaited ripple blanket story

Ok so here goes... the story begins around Christmas time. Not too long after to be honest when Eleanor had a sale on at Knit Nottingham. There were humongous reductions on a fair few things - one of which was the DK acrylic which she was selling at a ludicrous £1 per ball.

I have been reading the amazing blog called Attic 24 for ages now and this is one of my favourite pass-times during little breaks at work and in an evening. I love all of the things that Lucy makes and am always amazed by the wonderful colours - I think we all need a little brightening up in our lives.

We have the rainbow crockery and the placemats to match from our friends Mum which always make me smile when I use them. Anyway we have gone off on a little tangent here but it is all related I promise. This is getting to the idea that I had of making myself a blanket for my little crafty room so that I could snuggle down with it when I was in here creating. I suggested this and even phoned Eleanor to buy the wool in an array of bright colours when the sale was on.

Then I got home to my husband...who I thought would have gone mad when I said I had spent nearly £30 on wool and bought nearly 30 balls to make a blanket but he was really pleased and was upset when I said that I was making the blanket for myself in my little room. This lead to the conversation about where the blanket would go and he said that I should make this for our living room. Long story slightly shorter - I sent pictures of our mugs and plates to Eleanor and she kept up with this fantastic array of colours to match - with the beige thrown in to just make the blanket slightly less bright in our brown and cream living room.

Here they are! (finally - sorry!)

The colours have looked lovely for a while sat in a basket in the corner or our room.

Here's the teapot and mug combo that I got and that the blanket is slightly based on. I started off making a little sample of the ripple pattern that I wanted to use. I found the pattern on the blog (which I can't find again now without looking through the whole blog - sorry!)

I have drawn out the colour pattern and how I wanted the colours to appear. Including my sums to figure out how wide the blanket will come out once the pattern has formed.

Then begins the humongous chain...227 chains in all - that took a lot of concentrating to count that high without missing the odd one or two. I think in the end when I worked back along the row I might have been 1 too short but I did manage to add this into the pattern to make it look ok anyway.

Then the progress stopped - sweaters came into play with deadlines for that to be finished - other things interfered - all of the other little projects that I have blogged about since January, mini blankets (I think this might have been what got me back into the mood to crochet and to pick this up again), courses, holidays to Yorkshire. Now finally I have had time to work on this the pattern is starting to take shape.