Stripey Blanket WIP

Last week I showed you the beginnings of a stripey blanket I'd started.

Yesterday, I finished the first repeat of all the colours I'm using and this morning I did the first three stripes of the second repeat.

This was the third photo I took as I couldn't get the colours to show up very well and Jess kept sitting on the blanket (you can see her legs in the top left of the photo - that was the furthest away I could get her!).

In total, I'm using 33 different colours of various acrylic brands and am crocheting them up in rainbow order of colour group.  As I was working up the first colour repeat, some of the colours got discarded and I went rootling through my acrylic stash bag to find another couple of colours that I thought would blend in with what I'd got.  I didn't want to go out and buy any extra yarn, except for colours I particularly wanted to use but knew I'd run out of.

This blanket is destined for DD1 and I've consulted her about which colours are going where and this is a combination that we're both happy with.

The funny thing about colour is how shades can change depending on which other colours they're next to.  For example, when I started the second repeat (the lipstick red) I was a bit worried about how it looked next to the deeper violet purple and thought I might have to pull back several rows and have a re-think.  I then decided to roll the blanket around so I could see the violet group of colours next to all the reds and pinks and saw that as the red group got lighter,  into the pinks, the red didn't look quite so strident.

I think that I'll do three full repeats of all the colours and then choose colours from the middle bit to do a border.  As I'm doing two-row stripes of each colour, that'll give 198 rows which should work out at around 5 feet in length before the border.  I haven't worked out how I'm going to do the border yet - how many stitches per row around, etc - so I'm making a dishcloth in the same pattern to use as a practice piece.  The dishcloth is in the microfibre yarn that I made other cloths from a few months ago (the weirdly coloured stuff - do you remember?).  This ball is in a different colourway, but dyed in the same way and, erm, yes, it's ugly as well!  I'll show you when I'm done.

The pattern for this blanket is the Vintage Vertical Stripe (Ravelry link) which is very easy to do as it's just rows of treble crochet (UK terms), but worked into the gap between the stitches on the preceding row rather than through the 'v' at the top of each stitch.

I'm also past the heel and about 12 rows up the leg of my first Charade sock, but more about that in another post as I think I've rattled on enough today already!