Tag: book blanket

Discussion: Book Blanket

Posted February 11, 2019 by Nicky in General / 6 Comments

It’s been a few weeks since the last update, so how’re things going?

Here it is! It’s 10 hexagons in width, about a metre long, and currently has 19 hexagons joined. (Thank you to Hogglestock, my large inflatable hedgehog/seat, for his patience in modelling this.) I quite like the way the joining is working out — that ridge works nicely in defining each square and in just adding a little bit of oomph. I think I’m probably going to add a white border around the outer edge, though I’ll have to ponder how to give that the right texture. (Probably either front post crochets, or just crocheting into the front loops only.)

Things that’ve changed since my last post: I added a colour, in a sense, in that for a book which I read a significant amount of (over 25% minimum), if I feel it was still significant enough to record, I’m adding a motif with a white centre. You can actually see one there in the second row: that’s Jaine Fenn’s Hidden Sun, which I DNF’ed after discovering it came over all rape-apologism at the end.

I’ve also moved the categories slightly: books from my backlog from 2016 are now also using the dark green “bottle” colour, to try and balance out the sheer amount of the 2017-2018 books in “petrol”.

Finally, I’ve been deciding on how exactly to shape the blanket, just today! Right now there are 10 motifs in the first row and 9 in the second, and I actually tied off in order to take a fairly neat picture. However, there are two possible ways to do this — or really, way more, but I already decided I wanted it to be more or less straight rather than off-setting each row. Here’s the image I whipped up in Paint to show my wife:

I’ve decided to go with #2, I think — for one thing, it’ll help control the length of it, even if I read an absolute ton!

So that’s where we are right now!

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Discussion: Book Blanket

Posted January 24, 2019 by Nicky in General / 0 Comments

It’s been a Week, and I’m behind on all kinds of blog things. So I thought I’d quickly share a pic of one of my recent hexagons, and the exact pattern if you wanted to follow me exactly.

So first, here’s the hexagon for Shades of Milk and Honey, a reread (the deep purple outer ring, “emperor”) that’s fantasy, romance and historical fiction (“turquoise” for fantasy, “bright pink” for romance; it’ll be “spring green” for other when I read any historical fiction, but I wanted to keep it somewhat simple).

The pattern is from CrochetSpot, but they don’t explain exactly how to do it (it’s more how to work out the pattern for an expanding motif of any number of sides) and I’ve made a few tweaks for stability. This might sound like total witchcraft if you’re not into crochet!

So if you’re looking at the pic above, we’ll call the pink colour A, the blue colour B, and the purple colour C. We’re using US terminology, because that’s what I’m most used to in patterns.

Dc – double crochet
Ss – slip stitch
Ch – chain
Chain space – the visible gap between the clusters in the previous round

Round 1: With colour A, do 3ch up from a magic circle and then 17 dc into the magic circle. Draw it closed so there’s almost no hole. Ss into the top of the 3ch. (18 stitches)
Round 2: 3ch (counts as first dc). *[dc, ch3, dc] in next stitch, dc in next two stitches*, repeat from * around until you have six clusters of four stitches each. Ss into the top of the 3ch. (24 stitches)
Round 3: Join with colour B in the first stitch of a cluster. 3ch, 3dc, *[dc, ch3, dc] in ch space, dc in next 4 stitches*, repeat from * around until you have six clusters of six stitches each. Ss into the top of the 3ch. (36 stitches)
Round 4: Join with colour C in the first stitch of a cluster. 3ch, 5dc, *[dc, ch3, dc] in ch space, dc in next 6 stitches*, repeat from * around until you have six clusters of eight stitches each. Ss into the top of the 3ch and tie off. (48 stitches)

I’ve made slight adjustments from the CrochetSpot pattern, as I mentioned, mostly for stability; I don’t like having the 3ch forming chain spaces, as then you can get stretchy gappiness when joining to the rest of the cluster instead of a smooth consistent look all round. I’ve found that making sure the 3ch is part of the cluster keeps things neat. You can improve that by starting right in the center of a cluster when you change colours.

If you’re doing that, you can just think of it as 3ch from where you are, crochet into each dc from the previous round, and [dc, 3ch, dc] in the chain spaces. It’s true in every round after the second, if you want to make the hexagon bigger. Mine comes out just a bit bigger than the palm of my hand; around 10cm in diameter. If you’re looking for an easy motif that isn’t a plain old granny square, this is pretty simple and repetitive. I’m now down to about 30 minutes for making a motif, joining it to the other squares, and tucking in the ends.

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Discussion: Book Blanket

Posted January 14, 2019 by Nicky in General / 4 Comments

Since last week, I’ve picked out my colour palette (such as it is — my wife was involved, and she loves a riot of colour) and ordered the yarn! So I thought I’d update on the chosen colour palette. Here’s an image with some colour swatches to give you a better idea:

Graphic showing the colours I've chosen for my blanket and what each one means
Graphic showing the colours I’ve chosen for my blanket and what each one means (click to embiggen)

In other words, looking at the table below, for each square I’m going to make the centres out of a colour chosen based on the genre of the book (table A) and then a round in a colour chosen based on the source of the book (table B). If the book covers two genres, I’ll do two rounds for the first genre and two rounds for the second genre.

Table A: Genres and Colours

GenreFantasySFMysteryScienceHistoryRomanceOther
ColourTurquoiseStorm BlueClaretLobeliaGoldBright PinkGrass Green

Table B: Genre and Colour

SourceBacklog 2011-2015Backlog 2016-2018Acquired this yearLibrary, ARC, borrowed, etc
ColourBottlePetrolBoysenberryEmperor
So a book that’s a Mystery/Romance, bought back in 2014, will get two rounds in Claret and two in Bright Pink, followed by a round or two (I haven’t decided yet, it will depend on the size when made) in Bottle. That will have a border in Cream, which will also attach it to the next square. I need to look up how to join with crochet in a blanket, but that shouldn’t take too much effort!

All the colours picked were Stylecraft Special DK; I also got a refer-a-friend link which will get you 15% off a first order from LoveKnitting, which will also give me 15% off my next order for anyone who signs up! Click here for 15% off yarn from LoveKnitting!

Finally, I also picked out the design: I’m going to keep it simple and go with an expanding geometric hexagon, with the pattern from CrochetSpot — circled in red on this photo from their pattern:

Okay, that’s all for this week! Hopefully next week I’ll have some progress on the actual blanket to show you.

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Discussion: Book Blanket

Posted January 7, 2019 by Nicky in General / 8 Comments

While clicking around on Twitter, as you do, I learned about an awesome project some other book nerds are doing. (Full credit: I heard about it from a booktuber, Claire Rosseau.) I’m not much into Instagram or Youtube or whatever, so if there’s a linkup anywhere for web bloggers, someone gimme it and I’ll be right over like a shot.

Anyway, what is this awesome project? A book blanket! Basically, for every book I read in 2019, I crochet a motif to be part of a blanket. Each motif’s colours will be dictated by the book I just read (so for example, if I just read a fantasy book, I’d make a purple square). At the end, I should have a massive blanket of around 250 motifs, if I read roughly the same amount I read last year. It’s going to be epic! (And unlike some of my other blanket projects, it’s very deliberately piecemeal, and so I should be able to do it in little bits as I go along.)

And of course, I’ll blog about every step of the project. When I have an update, I’ll post about it as my discussion post for the week (and when I don’t have any news, which will be most of the time, I’ll think of something else, or post a book review instead). I’ll probably do a couple more of these in January covering my decision process, though, because here I get to combine crochet and books, and that’s pretty awesome.

So! What have I decided so far? I’ve decided that I’ll use acrylic yarn. Any wool-mix is out for me, due to sensitive skin: I can just about work with wool-mixes without problems, but they irritate my skin a lot. Cotton is nice, but could get expensive, and can also be really stiff — not what you want in a big snuggly floppy blanket. So acrylic is my decision: generally hard-wearing, easy to wash, and not too expensive either. And I think I’ll go for DK for the yarn weight; smaller is fiddlier, and there’s a lot more variety available in DK. Chunky yarn is a love of mine, but with 200 motifs, it’d come out too big.

How am I going to join them? Having laboriously sewn a blanket together at the end — a small blanket, at that — I’m going to crochet them together with white yarn. That will give each of them a border, look nice, and can be done as I go along. So I’ll need an extra skein of yarn in white.

To LoveKnitting.com! Having worked with it before and looking at the huge colour selection, I think I’m going to go for Stylecraft Special DK. I’ll probably try and keep the whole thing in the same brand of yarn, to ensure that as much is kept similar as possible, but it shouldn’t matter too much as long as the material and the weight are the same for all the motifs.

Posts to come: colours! Motif type! Maybe a tutorial video or step by step post in which I show you how to make the motif if you want to give it a try!

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