Primrose Garden

In February 2019 I started working on an idea for a crochet blanket, inspired by Islamic tiled patterns. I experimented with various sizes of squares and long hexagons to start with ...

... and then spent a very long time trying to choose a combination of colours to use ...

I had a rough idea of the sort of stitch patterns I wanted to use but kept changing the details with every new set of colours.

Finally, I decided it would be a Spring blanket and chose three shades each of green and yellow, with a very pale yellow for contrast. I wanted to use my trusty Stylecraft Special DK with its huge range of colours and it didn't take me long to settle on my yellows and greens.

From left to right, they are Lime, Mustard, Citron, Lemon, Pistachio, Meadow and Cypress.

The main part of the blanket is made up of a combination of squares and long hexagons. The squares are heavily textured; I had fun working out all sorts of effects for these.

In contrast, the long hexagons are simpler, mostly rows of double crochet (US single crochet).

It took me over a year to crochet all the squares and hexagons. Then came the fun part of sewing them together; this is when the whole thing started to take on a 3D look.

It looks as if those four squares are lying on top of the bigger square but the whole thing is flat. Once all the shapes were joined together, I had to design and crochet 20 half hexagons to fill in the gaps round the edges and then add a border to finish off the blanket.

I finished my blanket in the Spring of 2020 ... and then I got ill. So, I decided to put the blanket away and publish it the next Spring. Which brings us up to date.

It turns out that it's very difficult writing a long and complex pattern a whole year after making it. Although I had lots of notes in my pattern notebook, it wasn't fresh in my mind and that made the whole process very laborious. 

Several months later, I finally had a 21 page draft pattern - 21 pages! Proofreading brought it down to 20 pages but even so ... Don't be put off by the length of the pattern though. There are lots of photos and a fair bit of repetition. I wanted to include as much information as possible to help the less experienced crocheters, thinking that the more advanced will just skip the bits they don't need.

As with all my other patterns, you can download Primrose Garden free of charge from ravelry. As I write this, my garden is full of wild primroses so the timing seems just right, even if it is a year late. I look forward to seeing other people's versions of this blanket; changing the colour scheme would give it a whole new look.