Soothing Stitches: The Dartmoor Crochet Blanket.

I spent a significant portion of last year and the early part of this year putting together a blanket for my bedroom, a promise against the day when my bed will belong to me and Max again and my floor has less to do with a washing sorting area and more to do with the words clean and clear. Although ideally, beige carpet will no longer figure at that point. *grrrr… new house developers… grrr*

After finishing my first ever granny square blanket, spotted in a Rowan book while holidaying, I decided to make another, bigger one. My inspiration was some of the colours we see on our holiday to Dartmoor, the place where my heart so firmly is and my body just can’t quite get moved to.

The blanket is made from Rowan Renew, possibly my favourite yarn ever but sadly discontinued. No one seems to know why, not even them 🙁

Here are some Dartmoor snaps for to explain the colour inspiration.

If you don’t know Dartmoor, I can only tell you it is a place filled with greens of more shades than any wool range could do justice to, expanses of water reflecting the bluest sky there ever is, clouds, wispy topped marsh grasses, gorse, heather, foxgloves, all woven in an ever changing tapestry.For us, it is also full of memories and perfect to sleep under for that reason. The tweedy altering shades of Rowan Renew were perfect for it.

The squares are very simple 4 round granny squares in (UK) triples. Nothing fancy. Here is a great tutorial to make one. I made 24 different squares in all different colour combinations, 8 each of the first 12 and 7 each of the second 12. 180 squares in total and a 15×12 rectangle when completed, all on a 5.5mm hook. I guess any similar chunky yarn would work.

Here are the square combinations, starting from the centre of each square and going outwards. Since Rowan Renew is gone, there is not much point in listing the colour names, but as a general shade guide, here goes.

A= White, B= Yellow, C= P Green, D= D Green, E= Blue, F= Lilac, G= Purple.

Call it a hippy moment but I didn’t want to impose an actual ‘pattern’ on this because the feel of Dartmoor is so natural and I wanted it to ape that, so I decided to go ‘random’. The only problem with this is that I ‘don’t do random’ so I ended up with a complicated bit of faffery that involved no adjacent squares (not diagonally, that was impossible!) not having the same centre or outer colour. This involved a LOT of people staring at my rows as they were put together to see if I had made any mistakes. I’m convinced eventually we will find one! I’ll be 92 and taking it apart to fix an error. Or maybe one day I’ll take it apart and make a pattern out of it.

This was a return to my (UK) DC down one side of a square and then DC’s to join it to the next square method that I used for my original blanket. It leaves a ridge on the back that I sort of like but would like to learn not to have. I’ve got a new blanket on the hook at the moment (a commission for my sister in the remains of my Renew) and I’m going to try a different join I think

This was a pretty fluid blanket creation in may ways; I picked up odds and ends of the yarn as it went on sale and didn’t keep a check on what it actually used. I could weigh it I suppose. Judging by my previous one though, which was 2/3 the size, I think it is probably 90 balls worth, which had I not paid peanuts for a lot of it, would have been very spendy. Thankfully I got lots of it at almost cost price. At one point I worked out that full cost yarn plus this blanket at minimum wage for hours of work, would be around £900!