A Blanket for Claudia

My dear friend Claudia and her partner received the first blanket of the modern era of Annie. It was complicated as far as chart, but extremely simple in terms of color. So, remembering the success of the blanket for Christina, I asked Claudia for a color consult. Claudia is a quilter, and assembles color on a regular basis. She and I went through my stash and picked out colors for her blanket.

It was more a matter of grouping colors together. Then with those groups, I picked out patterns. There is more of the metallic yarn from the stash of Barb Grossman, and Claudia picked out some truly lush color combinations.

The text for the names has finally come into focus. The letters are not so tall and skinny any more, but nice and round. The spirals next to the name were a particular challenge. I made a couple of tries before I was happy with the chart for these. But then the experiments became coasters to go along with the blanket.

As you can see, it is very rich in color indeed. If I had a favorite blanket, this one might be it.

My Horizon Becomes Broadened

I'd been happily making wash and wear blankets with my acrylic for some decades when a friend popped out of nowhere with a bag of yarns for me. I took it happily, not knowing where this would lead. Yarn addiction is a serious thing, and I was being lead in a dangerous direction indeed. But I didn't know that at the time. I was an innocent in the ways of the yarncrafters.

To make matters worse, the friend with the stash was Barbara Grossman, founder and director of the Pittsburgh Knit and Crochet Festival. The first one of these festivals was five years ago, and I attended in a working capacity. I was on the board of directors for The Midwife Center for Birth and Women's Health www.MidwifeCenter.org and we were selling snacks and lunches as a fundraiser at the festival. Most of my day was spent behind the food counter, but I did wedge myself into the crowds to look around a bit. There were vendors selling an astounding collection of pretty things that were rather overwhelming to me. There was a dazzling array of classes in subjects that were completely foreign to me. My limited experience, self taught as I was, had ill prepared me for this environment. It was just as well. The first festival was so jam packed with attendees that one could barely insinuate oneself through the throngs.

But back to that stash. There was some yarn that had a metallic thread through it. Since this was a stash, there were no labels, so I had no chance of finding that particular one again. I set out to find something at least similar. What Was I Thinking??? My first searches were online, and I began to taste some of what is out there. Wool, linen, alpaca, merino, cotton, silk, bamboo, mohair, soy (!), angora, cashmere, et cetera an nat. I could and did search for yarn with metallic content. I could and did search for machine washable.

And I found far more than I ever bargained for. But that is for the next blog entry. For now, a suitable yarn was found. There was not nearly enough of it to make a blanket, but it could accent one nicely. Here began a collaboration. I make the patterns and designs using Excel, and Christina is my color consultant. She, being an architect, has more sense of color than I do. Chris had in mind something with an overall unity of design. It was a foreign idea to me, but what could it cost to humor her? She grouped colors together, and this is what came out. I was almost shocked by how well it worked.

Now, I ask for color consult on a regular basis. A huge resource had been right under my nose, and I hadn't known it.

Letters

The evolution of names on the blankets has taken a while. The charting of each letter was done in Excel, using cells as pixels. In my usage, one cell on an Excel page represents one stitch of crochet. I learned fairly early on that in crochet, stitches are not square. If I followed a pattern that was charted on a page of squares, my finished crochet work would look very tall and skinny, simply because my stitches are not square like the graph. It took a lot of fiddling and fooling until I found the proper ratio for my stitches. When charting on graph paper, my pixels - one pixel representing one stitch - needed to be taller than wide. These letters were made early on in the scheme of things, and so look pretty tall and skinny.














Since making the above, the letters have come along nicely. This letter C, for example, is better proportioned. The proportion was getting straightened out, but the lines still didn't look quite right. The horizontal lines looked fine, and even the diagonal lines looked better than the vertical. In experimenting, I found that the trick lay in where to switch colors of yarns. I had been changing yarn colors after a completed stitch, but found that I got a much better vertical line by changing colors halfway through a stitch. This leads to its own particular set of troubles, but it does solve the problem of letters looking all spiky and zippery along their edges. Contrast these two vertical lines, each from the letter i.

Dward and Spot

Dward is my friend Edward. When he needed a dog in his life, Sydney and I took him to the shelter to shop. Sydney needed to approve whatever choice he made for a canine companion, since she would be spending time with the new arrival and might tear it to shreds on sight. My approval was needed since Ed's health is a crap shoot from day to day, and I would inherit any dog he came home with, just in case.

The first dog we visited with was at the same shelter Sydney had been adopted from. This was a sweet doggie, and she was not a puppy which in my mind was a big plus. But she was a heavy, heavy shedder. We happened to be browsing at the shedding time of year and she was "blowing" her coat. After sitting on the floor with this dog for five minutes, Ed was surrounded by a rug made of her fur. I turned her down. Sydney had no opinion.

At the next shelter, Sydney was asked to stay in the waiting area, since there was a touch of kennel cough running through the inmates there. I sat with her, wondering (and dreading) what Ed might bring forth from the many dogs in the pens. Not two minutes later he returned with an indescribable glow emanating from his every pore. "I found my dog. She's perfect. I found the perfect one." If you know Dward, you have some inkling of what I was going through as I waited to see what he had set his heart upon. "Just wait till you see her," he kept saying as he rocked from one foot to the other in a frenetic back-and-forth dance. I learned in a few moments that he had found a puppy. A puppy covered in dog shit.

I had to wait while they scraped her off a bit to make her somewhat presentable. When this puppy was brought out, Ed and I both held our breath. What would Sydney do to this baby? Into how many shreds would she be torn? We needn't have worried. Sydney, like most dogs, knows about babies. This little pup crawled all over Sydney, pulled her tail, nipped her ears, and Sydney posed like a Sphynx on the floor under all this indignity. We were amazed.

Ed named her Spot. Here she is the next day, at the park. That was April, 2004. Since then, Spot has become a part of the pack, and a part of our lives. Ed and I are both convinced that she saved his life, in a number of ways and on a number of occasions.

This was my first attempt at anything other than letters and numbers. Spot just had to have, well... spots. The spots weren't charted, I just made them up as I crocheted along. That explains why they are somewhat lopsided here and there.

Dward needed to have his name in two colors, to commemorate the mismatched socks he wears.










And the intertwined hearts?
You figure it out.

2004 Was A Busy Year

This stack of blankets was a pretty ambitious goal for the year, since they all had to be done by Christmas. I don't have photos of all of them, but I have sent out word, and they trickle in from time to time.



There was this one for David. I didn't yet understand how to do Tapestry Crochet, much less that it even had a name, and so the change in color for the lettering was not done strictly the way it should be done. In true tapestry crochet, the color that does not show gets carried, unseen, through the fabric of the other color, and serves to strengthen the piece. I hadn't yet figured that out, so instead of carrying the inactive yarn across several feet of blanket, I carried it far enough to anchor it, then snipped it off. I wonder how long those blankets will hold up under this less-than-optimal workmanship. But I was getting the hang of it, and the technique would continue to develop over the next few years. Remember, I was not taught how to do Tapestry Crochet. As far as I knew, I had invented it. People who knew knit and crochet would comment on how even and tight my stitches were, but they all said they had never seen anything like this.

The big red M with the hearts for the Milner family had me tearing my hair out. It is a combination of two techniques: Tapestry Crochet and the funny double crochet stitch. Either one of these stitches is tricky, but by this time each had become relatively doable. What made doing both together crazy-making was trying to figure out when in the course of the individual stitch to change color! I swore I would never attempt this again. Until this year, I remembered that promise. Then menopause memory caught up with me and I tried it again. That attempt was all I needed to remind me of just how nutty this was.

Which brings us to Steven. He was kind enough to send me several photos, including close-ups of some sections. This zig-zag section was one that I had tried on the experimental blanket, and so I decided to try it once again. I like it! This is another reason to keep photos of what I have done before - so I can do it, or a variation, again.

Claudia and Jennifer get a blanket

Jennifer and Claudia got the first blanket of the new era. It has two types of eternity knot, each done twice. It is the only one if its kind so far, being square, and having no other pattern than the eternal knot. Later on I would make them each their own blanket (you can see Claudia's blanket hanging, waiting to be photographed.)

This is the only blanket, other than the experimental one, where separate pieces were joined together. These were joined with a few rows of single crochet that include a zig-zag looking pattern.

The Beginning of Patterns, er, Charts

Now we begin in earnest. This means making blankets for friends. And this also means continuing to make patterns. (I have since learned that these are called Charts.)

This is what is left of my original pattern book:











The book has been through a lot since I began using it over thirty years ago. Nowadays I create patterns and graphs on the computer.

Fans of my work may recognize the third pattern in brown and yellow. It is a variation of a Finnish pattern, Hannun Vaakuna, or Saint John's Arms.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saint_John%27s_Arms

It is used in a lot of ways by many peoples, but in my usage it denotes an eternity symbol.






And when it is added to a blanket in the colors of Black and Gold, well, it is clearly a reference to the Steelers.






This pattern is another variation of that same eternity symbol, this time being tipped into a diamond. With this symbol begins my fascination with celtic knots and borders. This symbol, in various sizes, appears on many blankets. It is done in one color, with the stitches, not the colors, creating the pattern.













Here is one last page from the book, with some examples of Grecian keys. Working with these symbols has led me to do some research into their meaning. Grecian keys are an offshoot of the labyrinth, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labyrinth which in its true meaning was a one way path that meandered around so that it felt like a maze. But if one kept one's wits about them, proceeding at a steady pace, one would eventually emerge from the labyrinth. The Grecian key simply is a more orderly depiction of the concept.
Grecian key patterns can be found everywhere in architecture. Floor tiles, wall trim, window decoration, etc contain numerous examples of this type of ornamentation. Here is one example from wallpaper.
Both of these types of patterns are very painstaking to do, since one stitch in the wrong place makes it all come out wrong.