You ready bee? ooOHh This sea of stripy colours…. Are you ready for a little tactile dive? I’m thrilled to introduce you to my new crochet blanket project. I’ve been waiting to put this post together for weeks. We had the holidays break here and I spent most of it with my family trying to make the best out of this special season. Well I can’t complain because I had plenty of time to crochet though not at all enough time at my studio. Not to mention any working routine. But at least I had some family time along with some delicious hooky time surrounded by colourful cotton. I’ve been working on this Stripes & Colours blanket for a while and what a joy it brings in – not enough words to describe it. A joy of colour therapy with each and every stitch made. This new blanket is made out of three things I love: Cotton, Stripes & Colours – this trio is my favourite. If you follow me on IG or FB you probably saw a few colourful moments of this Work In Progress and today I’ll tell you more about it. The idea of this blanket popped into in my mind way back in the summer, while I was deeply busy working on my Linen Clutch pattern. I was so in love with the woven effect that this stitch makes. After it was ready, we started crocheting it here. A few of my Workshops/ Mondays’ girls mentioned that they would be happy to start a new cotton blanket project. Surprisingly I was cooking something similar at the same time. It was just a few days later that I started working on my new cotton stripy sketches. I started my first trials and I was very much into sock knitting and sock yarns. These sock yarns stripes and patterns got me hooked, and I knew my next project will somehow reflect it.  About the pattern & the colours
I knew for sure the pattern and main subject of this blanket will be STRIPES involving both Linen Stitch and sock yarns/colours inspiration. One of the first boards I created on Pinterest is my Stripes board and when I started to learn how to knit socks I added a Socks board. These two boards supplied me with so much colour inspiration. If you use #handknittedsocks on IG you’ll get a huge virtual treasure of colour combinations and colour inspiration. I spent quite a while browsing these socks and stripes hashtags. My first step was to put a few colours of Granny Kit cotton (inspired by these Pinterest boards) in my Hello Yellow bag and let my hands do their thing…… and they did. I made a few strip-y sketches not just because I was looking for the right colour sequence but also to test out some sizing and tension. I knew from the beginning that this blanket project is going to be a kit on my Etsy shop so I had to weight each row to get the idea of sizes and number of cotton balls needed for this project. I will provide the exact size details on my next blog post but this blanket is going to measure approx 90cm x 120cm. The more I crochet it became clearer to me what colours are in and what colours will stay out. My striped dress on the above picture made these stripes & colours pop up even more. What is it in stripes that makes this magic? I think stripes are all about relations between colours. When I was a student in the textile design department in Shenkar college, I had an artist teacher named Arthur Goldreich. He was teaching me so much about colours. I remember once he was standing in front of me, holding a few colour cards in his hands showing just a little of each of the cards and asking me: how much of the second colour do you think we have to show next to the first one in order to let them shine together? How much to show of the third? and so on. Ohh how I loved these colours sessions with him. He was one of my favourite teachers and an inspiring personality regardless being a teacher. You can learn more about Arthur here. I do miss him and think of him very often, especially while planing and designing my Stripes & Colours blanket.I crocheted these “test” samples and I was very VERY pleased with the fact that I reached almost a woven texture on the crochet stitches combination I made. On the third sketch/sample piece I felt I have enough information and that everything I need in order to start crocheting my Stripe & Colours blanket is there. At this point I knew exactly what are the colours I will leave out and what are the colours that will go in.

The colours that create this blanket are as follows ::
Sand :: Gold :: Spicy :: Wheat :: Matisse :: Turquoise :: Cadet :: Alice :: Platinum :: Loft :: Jasper :: Shale Grey :: Peach :: Coral :: Baby Pink :: Ruby :: Framboise :: Berry :: Roseate :: Umber :: Cameo :: Lilac ::
I gathered all the cotton balls needed for this project and put them in a bag, which by itself considered as a festive moment. The special moment of starting a new projec. Everything you need is in just one happy bag. It is not the first time I find my BOOKHOU bag as a perfect blanket project bag. Unfortunately my hello Yellow bag was too small for all the cotton balls needed for this project plus the crocheted blanket that is about to grow into it.This is the first row made on my Stripes & Colours blanket. HAPPY ME. My sketches are right next to me.

My Stripes & Colours blanket became even prettier than the samples. I was totally hooked on this strip-y rhythm and every row added made it even richer. The colours just flew out of my hands. It was a huge help though to have these samples next to me. They functioned as a dictionary which I could go through every time I have to pick the next colour or colour block. The more it grows the more I got hooked. This woven feeling creates such a rich crochet texture. The vertical and horizontal stripes look almost like a warp and weft on a weaving loom. The combination of stitches creates a very special way for the stripes to shine through. The colours are so bright and cheerful and as you can see, wearing a striped T shirt or dress goes very well with this project. Have I told you I love striped T shirts? My Stripes & Colours blanket project supplies me with hours of pure pleasure. This is colour therapy in its best. I really hope those colourful textured stripes inspire you to create your own Stripes & Colours blanket, you will enjoy every stitch. The plan is to finish writing down the pattern and as soon as the pattern for both blanket and edging is written I will add the Stripes & Colours kit to my Etsy shop. My kids are now back to school and we all are back to our routine again, so I really hope it’ll be soon. On the other hand I don’t want to finish crocheting these colourful stripes. It is such a pleasure and it keeps me happily busy. Thank you so very much for visiting me here, following and reading me. I’ll go back to dive into these Stripes & colours now and I’ll be back soon with some more stripe-y news, xoxMo.

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