Colorful striped blanket

Our new colorful striped blanket :)

We have a lot of blankets in our little apartment. And making one to add to our already large collection never really occurred to me. But I had two things happen in quick succession working against me. First I had just finished my friend's toddler blanket. Second my husband and I went to a craft store with an amazing yarn sale.

We weren't even going to the store for yarn if I remember correctly. But I always wander through (because you never know) and we ended up walking out with this.

Tour of yarn!

And we actually went back later and bought three more!

Main Info

• Size: 3.5 ft x 7 ft
• Time: 24.75 hours
• Yarn: 18 skeins of Loops and Threads Charisma
• Stitch: Single crochet - Bricks in Crochet Inspiration by Sasha Kagan

Thoughts from the process

This blanket surprisingly took me much shorter than the Catherine Wheel blanket. This is mainly because the yarn was much thicker, 8mm or US L-11. I even had to buy a new hook! I also went with a very simple stitch and blanket pattern.

I'd never worked with Loops and Threads Charisma. It's a softer bulkier yarn than what I'm used to, hence buying a new hook, and I think it's more meant for fashion crochet like scarves. The husband loved the idea of it for a blanket and argued that if we were going to spend money on a handmade blanket we should go big. He also helped choose the colors, his artistic eye is better than mine. We went with brown tones as the unifying color. My favorite color is blue and his is green. We chose the red because it matched best among the other options.

Our blanket colors from Loops and Thread Charisma

I chose the "single crochet - bricks" stitch in Crochet Inspiration by Sasha Kagan. I like this stitch for it's simplicity, but also visual interest. The yarn changing color also helped highlight the stitch more, as can be seen in the below picture.

Single crochet - bricks

As for the pattern for the overall blanket I went super simple. I crocheted with one skein until I ran out and then switched to the next color. This meant usually switching in the middle of a row, but I wanted to use as much of the yarn as I could. If you look carefully in the picture below you can see where I changed.

Detail photo of the blanket stripes

The main reason to just crochet until I ran out was very few of the skeins had the same dye lot number, which means they could fade differently over time. However if there are two stripes between any same color, it'll be much harder to tell that is the case. Plus the separateness removes the expectation that the same color should perfectly match.

The simple pattern though led to the surprise of how long the blanket turned out to be. 7 feet long after all! I had tested out how wide a stripe would be and had calculated we'd need more skeins, hence the extra run to get three more. But I hadn't compensated for stretching. So we ended up with a couple's lap blanket, which suites us just fine actually :)

The blanket is 3.5 feet wide, 102 stitches across, or 43 groups of 3, since the stitch needs groups of 3. If I could do it again, I'd probably add another 6 or 9 stitches to the width, which would make it about 4 feet wide.

In the end I was glad when the blanket was done because it was bulky to work on.

Finally done! Look at all those wrappers.

Though I did find I could just leave the bulk of the blanket on my husbands lap while we watched TV and twist the blanket as I worked on it. Sorry no picture of that to better explain it.

And overall we both get a lot of use out of the blanket :)