66

Amanda Perkins creates beautiful works of art from her many-coloured crocheted motifs

Soft rainbow-coloured blankets, created from a jigsaw of shapes and shades, spill out of bags in the North Devon workroom of crochet-pattern designer Amanda Perkins. Balls of yarn are arranged in clusters around the floor, waiting to be turned into future creations. A few finished motifs sit on a table. Next to them are jars holding an array of hooks. These beautifully crafted blankets are a world away from the bright random tones of the traditional granny squares usually associated with crochet. Created from circles, triangles, stars and squares, each motif is made up of myriad colours. “To me, I am not just making a blanket, I’m making a piece of art,” says Amanda. They are not made for sale. Instead she uses them to illustrate what can be achieved with the 100 designs she has created in the past 10 years.

Nature’s influences

Amanda was taught to crochet by her grandmother. “I’ve been doing crochet all my life. My granny used to pull apart knitted garments from jumble sales and make blankets. My mother and my granny taught me to knit but I didn’t do it properly. Crochet was a lot easier than knitting because I did a lot of drawing and I could hold the hook like a pen rather than having to use two hands.” She went on to do an art foundation course specialising in textiles. However work and family life meant that she did not pick up a crochet hook again for many years. Then 15 years ago, she became interested in dyeing her own yarn for some embroidery. It began when she decided to pick plants from the hedgerows for dyes, as a cheap way of achieving the colours she wanted. Eventually she realised it was easier to buy plant dyes. A friend then suggested she tried dyeing wool. “I dyed far too much for personal use so decided to sell the excess,” she says. This gradually turned into a business, the Natural Dye Studio. “The wool sold like hot cakes so I ended up dyeing more to keep up with demand and the business developed from that. “I was dyeing solidly and exhibiting at wool trade shows. People asked what they could make with the wool, so I realised we had to have patterns.” She saw a knitted toilet dolly while staying at a guest house and decided to make one. “I couldn’t work out how to knit it so I crocheted one instead. I haven’t stopped since. I designed scarves and made my own clothes. People at shows liked what I was wearing so I wrote patterns. Then I made a couple of blankets and it grew from there.” Amanda closed the dyeing business 18 months ago to focus on her crochet designs. She sells these online, at

shows and in four books she self-published. For the past two years, she has been working on her first book with a publisher, Rainbow Crocheted Blankets.

Creating patterns

Crochet is a series of interlocking looped stitches created with a single hook. The blankets are fashioned as a patchwork of pieces or motifs worked in the round and joined together. Using a fine 4-ply yarn to get the amount of detail she wants, it takes Amanda approximately two months to create one measuring 40 x 60in (approximately 101 x 152cm). It can, however, take longer to create the initial design. One design incorporating the stars of the Zodiac took six months to perfect to ensure the featured constellations were all in the correct position. Before she picks up a crochet hook and yarn, her designs and colourways are all worked out on graph paper. She

designs intuitively, allowing her ideas to stew, before committing them to a pattern. “The colours and the shapes excite me,” she says. “I’m always thinking about designs. As I’m making one blanket, I’m thinking about the next one. I love the tactile element, the fact it keeps people warm and you’re putting love into something. “I work on the computer in the morning creating the designs, then crochet until I go to bed.”

Simple tools

Over the years, Amanda has amassed hundreds of hooks, ranging in size from 0.25mm to 5.5mm. She prefers metal ones rather than wooden ones because they go through the holes smoothly, with plastic handles that are warm to hold. Her work is completed using the basic crochet stitches of slip stitch, chain, double-crochet, half-treble, treble and double-treble. “I use a half-treble most of the time because it’s just once round the hook, it’s quick and it’s not too big,” she says. “Then I crochet the motifs together. When I finish one motif, I don’t break the end, I crochet it to the next one. I like to do it as I go rather than have a big pile of them because, that way, I can see the design building. “I am completely obsessed. When it’s done, I even enjoy sewing in the ends because turning a mess into something neat is very satisfying. Then I wash the blankets because that settles the stitches.” Only naturally dyed fibres are used to create the blankets, including merino, angora and camel. She does not buy large amounts at a time. “I use yarn that I’ve already got, tiny leftovers, then I buy a bit here and there. Most blankets have a bit of silk in them. It adds depth of colour and texture and gives a drape to it. Because I’m touching it for a long time every day, I want something soft. “I use about half a dozen suppliers. They are friends and I want to support them. Everything I do has to have a personal connection.” She uses wool from a local breed of sheep, the

“The purest and most thoughtful minds are those which love colour the most.” John Ruskin, The Stones of Venice

Exmoor Blueface. “I could have walked past a field with those sheep in it,” she says. “Another yarn is from a woman who breeds her own sheep and it smells of the lanolin in their wool. It has a story.”

Multitude of shades

One of the people who has inspired her is Kaffe Fassett, a textile artist famed for his vibrant use of colour. “Crochet is not respected as much as knitting. I’d like to do for crochet what Kaffe Fassett did for knitting. In the Eighties, he woke people up to colour and shape,” she says. She visited a retrospective of his work in Bath, while she was still running the Natural Dye Studio. “Indirectly, he changed my life. I realised that I didn’t want to be arguing in a wet dye room, I wanted to concentrate on the thing that inspires me. I love orange and pink together and, as you walked into the exhibition, it was all orange and pink. Colour has always excited me. I like solid colours and I struggle with restricting how many colours I use,” she says. “I would rather use 20 shades of blue rather than the same blue. I love the texture and depth that gives. “I like rainbow colours but not the bright ones. I prefer the ones that have a bit of grey in them because they’re more natural. Over-saturated colour isn’t good against the skin.” A favourite shade is the burnt orange produced by the madder root, a staple of Persian carpets. Amanda uses it in many of her blankets. “Madder is earthy and smells of the desert. I would rather be inspired by a rug than another person’s blanket because I don’t want to copy anyone.” She enjoys solving problems that might arise. For her Kissing Circles blanket, she devised a method of joining together circular motifs. “My technical editor said you can’t join circles because there’s always a gap between them and they would be too floppy. But I developed chain-stitch fillers to hold them together. That’s the result of being told I can’t do something!”

Sharing a passion

In the 20th century, crochet became all about using up scraps, much of it cheaper synthetic yarn. But Amanda wants people to experience natural yarn, even if they buy only one skein. “Wool is sustainable. It’s warm, it breathes and it supports farming communities all over the world. I hope to inspire people to go beyond the granny square. I want to make crochet as exciting for them as it is for me.”

Two of Amanda’s blankets, Flower Power and Cornucopia. Flower Power, on the left, is one of the designs which will appear in her new book, due out this autumn.