Making something for me

Yes, I have decided to make something for ME!!!

The only problem is; I'm not so good at choosing a number of colours that go together well and it could all end up looking a bit funky all too easily.

To choose two or three colours that go together well is easy - just choose shades of the same colour - but I want to do the Bernat Mystery Afghan blanket CAL (that's a Crochet a-long) and for that I will need to find 5 complimentary colours that are available as yarn.

Luckily, a friend showed me this wonderful blog; Design Seeds.com Jessica is a proper designer; she's been a car designer, shoe designer, colour & material specialist and forecaster so she knows what she is talking about. She has all these wonderful photos on her blog and then, after she has got the mood just right, she picks out the main colours and shows us the proper hex numbers for them so that we can use her colourways for anything from wedding colours to afghan blanket colours.

This is the colourway of hers that I have chosen for my blanket out of the many, many she has.

If you go to the actual blog, you will be able to hover over the colour points and it will give you the proper hex numbers. You can also search for colourways by colour, or theme. It's really cool. But these are the ones I want for my blanket.

Well, its all well and good choosing lovely colours - but the real question is; are they available in the real world as real yarn colours? At this point, much internet searching went on. I mostly discovered that UK yarn is made in lots of colours - but they don't necessarily go together. UK yarn is not made in palettes, even finding shades of the same colour in the same brand of yarn is tricky.

Eventually, I found Hayfield Bonus DK which is made by Sidar. It has over 55 different shades to choose from. Well, did I find a good match for the picture? judge for yourself. Here is the picture again, this time with the yarn colours I chose in a bar across the bottom.

It's a pretty good match between the two, yes? The brown is a little darker than I hoped for but I won't really know the colours until the yarn arrives (I've only just ordered it so I can't wait for it to be delivered so that I can start)

The bar also shows how much of each colour will be used in the finished blanket. You need a main background colour, then 3 colours that work well together and a bright accent colour. That is all I know about the blanket - it is a mystery you see. You are given the various motifs to make one at a time and then they tell you at the end how it all goes together. For example motif one will have written instructions and how many to make. So, I have to make 9 motifs in the main colour, 1 in colour A, 1 in colour B and 1 in colour C. (I'm sure colour D will be in there somewhere later - maybe for a border)

The pattern is free on the Bernat website and, as I said, they release the motif patterns one at a time. They are doing a Crochet blanket and a Knitted blanket - I'm only doing the crochet one. I hope it does not get too difficult.