Rainbow blanket

Despite having several projects ongoing, I decided to start a new crochet blanket. It is winter after all, and you can never have too many blankets

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Given that I’ve already got three projects on the go, it probably wasn’t the best idea to start another one. But I bought some Ice acrylic yarn via a Facebook Group, wool for sale, and felt inspired to crochet a blanket. There are eight balls of wool, each a different colour and varigated, so the idea was to make a rainbow blanket.

Magic Light from Ice Yarns in rainbow colours.

I knew I wanted to create the blanket using crochet squares, using two or three different styles. The main square would be very plain to make the most of the varigated colours; the other squares would be lacy and there would be two per row. So I headed over to Ravelry and started searching. I quickly found three free patterns that exactly fitted what I wanted.

A couple of weekends ago The Chap and I went to Edinburgh for a long weekend, so I packed the patterns, a ball of yarn and my trusty crochet hook. First things first, I needed a sample of each square to see if they were the same size, or at least could be made to be the same size. And that’s when things started to go wrong.

Locutus.

I started on the first square, Veolias Mormorsruta. It soon became clear that the pattern was impossible to follow. It’s translated into English from Swedish, but I don’t think the translation is the problem. The pattern reads much like a technical challenge from Great British Bake-off: I’ve got the materials needed and some basic instructions, but half of it seems to be missing. I couldn’t work out what to do by studying the photo, and even checking Ravelry didn’t turn up any errata.

The pattern reads much like a technical challenge from Great British Bake-off: I’ve got the materials needed and some basic instructions, but half of it seems to be missing

So I had to move on to the next square, Locutus. This was much easier – I couldn't follow a couple of the instructions, but happilty I could work out what I was supposed to do by looking at the photo. The final square was a simple, solid granny square. So having made a couple of samples of Locutus, all I had to do was work out how many rounds were required to make the solid square the same size. Turns out it was eight rounds of treble crochet with a final round of double. Simple.

Solid granny square.

One ball of the Ice yarn will produce two Locutus squares and five solid ones. This should give me a blanket that’s about 130cm wide. With eight balls of wool, each in a different colour, it should be about 150cm long. So a nice size and when it’s done it’ll be perfect for wrapping around me when it’s cold.