There are over a dozen free events on our calendar this week. Let us know about yours at craftyliving@jg.net.I have crocheted a number of quilts in the last couple of years and have longed to design my own crochet quilt.
Inspired by the crochet quilt designs at www.happyyellowhouse.com, I set out to come up with what I call the “Flutter and Bloom” crochet quilt.
The beauty of the crochet quilt is how truly simple it is to complete, yet how intricate it can look. If you haven’t seen them before, go check out Happy Yellow House.
The quilts are made by crocheting “saltines,” the first two rounds of a granny square. In some cases, you have to crochet saltines that include two colors to form triangles of color.
In order to come up with this pattern I drew a butterfly onto graph paper, which I found at PaperPrintout.com, then squared off the butterfly.
From there, I tinkered with the sizing, hoping, once I figured out how to square it off, I was able to tinker with size.
I wanted to keep the larger squares at 8 saltines-by-8 saltines, but that wouldn’t work and give me a frame that had the butterfly centered in the square. Eventually I made my way to the 10-by-10 square.
As with knitting, you can reduce or increase the size of your crochet by changing hook size. I know my gauge pretty well and rarely do a swatch, but I knew I’d probably use an H hook for this project. The tulip square was simpler to design.
Once I had the squares designed, I put them together in a layout that included a total of nine squares (five butterfly, four tulip).
Because the squares included 100 saltines each, this turned out to be too large, so the blanket that I am working on will be a total of four squares.
Use your imagination to come up with the perfect color scheme. I used bright yellow, pink, green and purple.
A bit about this project by the numbers:
In order to figure out how much yarn was needed, I first crocheted a saltine and weighed it on my kitchen scale. It came in at about 0.1 ounce (barely measurable on the kitchen scale).
From there, I figured out how many saltines I would need of each color (including the half saltines for those squares that form points).
Once I knew how many saltines of each color I would need, I multiplied by 0.1 to come up with the number of ounces of yarn I would need in each color.
As always, I typically buy an extra skein of yarn in each color just in case. Then, I usually end up making hats, booties, sweaters to match the blanket.
If you like to crochet for charity (such as Project Linus), I think this is a great project.
