I'm still trying to work from my stash at the moment and have had this Yarnsmiths Pebble Haze DK for well over a year now. It's a lovely yarn, very soft and lovely to crochet (and knit) with.
I wanted to use just these four shades but I only had one 50g ball of each of the colours so it's taken me a long time to decide how best to use them. I also had two balls of white so it made sense to use this as a joining/border colour.
I did consider solid grannies but I've made a lot of them lately so trawled through my previous photos and came across the rainbow Harlequin blanket in the above photo that I made a couple of years ago from Solveig Grimstad's pattern she's shares freely on her blog here....
The diamonds are really simple to make, just rows of treble crochets which are increased and decreased to form the diamond shape. I made my diamonds 16 rows rather than the 20 rows shown in the pattern and you could easily make them bigger or smaller if you wanted to. There are also charts on the blog showing you how to make the filler triangles and half diamonds and these are worked in much the same way as the full diamonds.
I used the following shades of Pebble Haze
- Titanite 50g
- Olivine 50g
- Blue Slate 50g
- Chalcedony 50g
- Marble (joining and border) 100g
I spent quite a bit of time pondering placement. I would have liked to do a random diamond placement but with only four colours it doesn't really work so I opted for rows of colours but in a mirror image.
What I found when making this blanket pattern previously is that I was best to sew the ends in after joining as this helped to keep the 'pointy points' of the shapes sharper. I always get comments about ends whatever type of blanket I make......we seem to have been pre-programmed (or influenced?) to dislike dealing with ends and socials are full of videos showing 'hacks' and short cuts but for me crochet, as with a lot of handcrafts, isn't meant to be short cutted, it's meant to take time and I see sewing in ends just as much part of the whole blanket making process as choosing colours or stitch. In the grand scheme of things this blanket didn't really produce that many ends, just two per diamond and two per joining row so compared to some patterns it's not that end heavy at all.
The joining process is explained in Solveig's pattern....the diamonds are joined on the diagonal with double crochets and I love how the contrast join frames the diamonds
It doesn't seem to matter how many years I've been crocheting I'm still not great at estimating how much yarn I'll need for something and I really wasn't sure if 100g would be enough for the joining AND the border but it worked out really well and there was plenty left after joining for a simple border.
I did a foundation round of dcs and then a further three rounds of dcs. I then did a round of htr and a final round of dc, both these last two rounds I worked into back loops just to add a little interest.
A word about the border foundation round........ It's worth taking the time to get this first round right. If your border starts to ruffle then you have too many stitches, if it starts to curl inwards then you have too few. Sometimes it takes me a couple of goes to get it right. If a jobs worth doing it's worth doing well!
This is what I had left after I had finished the blanket.......it was a nice little baby blanket sized stashbuster!
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Thank you and happy crocheting
Faye :)
