Floral Blanket

What a brilliant day it was the day issue 20 of Simply Crochet Magazine dropped through my door.

 As I perused this magazine I came across a project that was simply love at first sight! I had to make it... now... this instant... could not wait! What was the object of my desire... Nicki Trench's Floral blanket. Swoon!
(On Ravelry she has called it Summer Bloom )

A quick delve into the yarn basket ( not a small basket by any means) and  found these colours in Stylecraft Special DK  grape, silver, willow, raspberry, gold, wisteria, pale rose and cream.

The flower pattern reminded me of the Passion flowers I have growing outside my back door.

I can't remember now how long a square took me, perhaps about half an hour, and they make a 15x15cm square using a 4mm hook.

They are missing the final round of white as I will be using the join as you go method to join.
Here is a useful video on joining solid grannies.

Slowly they grew... which is when I decided I would not be making a full size blanket of 80 squares as in the magazine but a more manageable 30 ( coward!) for a lap blanket!

 Starting to join...The Patchwork Heart has a useful join as you go map.

The joining method I used makes a slightly raised edge between the squares.

Onto the border. Well I always have trouble deciding on a border. I did not use the one suggested for the blanket in the magazine so in the end I did a row of tr, row of dc (twice) row of tr and finished with a row of (1dc, 3ch, sk3tr)repeat, with 3dc into each corner. I just made it up as I went along and luckily it worked out!

When finished it was approx 100x84cms. I am going to make another one soon in very different colours I think and hope it turns out as lovely as this one.

xxx Eirawen