MY HOOKY TREASURE
Fresh Stitches designer Stacey Trock hooked an amazing multicoloured afghan for the arrival of her daughter.
This rainbow ripple blanket that I made for my daughter, Maddie, is my favourite crocheted item. I finished crocheting it just a week before she arrived! I love rainbows and colours, so it makes me happy just looking at the blanket. But it’s taken on so much more meaning now that it’s become my daughter’s favourite, too. It has covered her since she was the tiniest baby (it was -5F (-20C) the day we left the hospital, so she needed a blanket!) and she sleeps with it every night now that she’s a two-year- old.
Maddie is such a sweetheart. She loves playing outside, dancing, reading books and art projects. We travel a lot (she went on 30 flights before her first birthday), so it’s really lovely that she has a special blankie to bring along with her.
It took me about a couple of weeks to make the blanket. Seeing the fun colour changes really kept me motivated! I used Brown Sheep Nature Spun, which is a 100% wool yarn that’s milled in the USA. It’s a lovely wool and they have a great palette of bright colours. I picked the seven colours of the rainbow that would work in a ‘cycle’, so you’ll notice that the blanket starts with pink, then goes to red and through the rainbow, ending with purple and then pink again. Because the afghan is a circle (and each successive row takes more yarn), this technique allowed me to get pretty close to using a full skein of yarn of each colour (instead of just using a tiny bit of one colour for the centre). Each colour is a three-row stripe, with a one-row stripe of the new colour and the old colour at each colour change. It gives a ‘gradient-style’ effect with solid yarn.
The whole blanket is done with double crochet stitches (trebles in UK terminology), with increases and decreases. It’s a free crochet pattern on Ravelry called Lyn’s Round Ripple Baby Afghan.
I get all sorts of compliments about this make, but the best feedback is that Maddie asks for her ‘rainbow blanket’ every night and uses the blanket to put her stuffed animals to sleep during playtime. Find Stacey Trock’s adorable amigurumi designs and Ami Club over at www.freshstitches.com