What happens when you take a Quilt design and dream up turning it into a Crochet Blanket pattern - well then Merryweather Blanket is born!
I have always crocheted since I was a young girl. My Nanna taught me how to at around 6 years of age and I was instantly in love with it. Many, many Granny Square Blankets later I just would use up any yarn I could find or was gifted. Fast forward to about 6/7 years ago and after having not picked up a hook since I was about 15 or so (so yes that is a fairly long time ago) I decided I wanted to get back into crochet and went and enrolled myself in a class. I was hooked again instantly. At this time I think because Quilting was well and truly becoming my full time job - Crochet gave me a creative outlet at night to just stitch and a break from Quilting.
Late last year I saw a Crochet Blanket that @insidethepaperbox was making and I immediately fell in love with this Christmas Stars Blanket Jessie was chrocheting. I was just in awe of it and I thought about how I loved that this was such a mix of Quilting and Crochet. I couldn't stop thinking about it and how I could try to turn one of my Quilt designs into a Crochet Blanket and how this would be such a great challenge for me to work on. I looked through my catalogue of Quilt patterns and then as soon as I saw my Aurora Quilt - I knew that was the one.
So in deciding that a challenge was in order - I spoke with my great friend Bonnie at @greenletterday. Bonnie is an amazing Yarn dyer from the US and I knew that I needed to work with her on this project. So after chatting with her about what I wanted to do we talked about how we could use her yarn and come up with a custom colour way to make this Merryweather Blanket (more about how this name came to be later). Bonnie and I chatted over a great number of DM's, emails and messages in working up this colour palette going back and forth and trust me - Bonnie had the patience of a Saint as I added in yarn skeins and took some away then put them back. I just wished we didn't live oceans apart as I wouldd have just loved to have dropped over to work through this process in person - but Bonnie made it easy. We came up with this palette - the Merryweather kit. 10 Skeins in total - 9 colours and 1 Background colour.
I knew that I need to come up with a great name for this Blanket. The quilt design is called Aurora and as I didn't want to confuse anyone by calling it the Aurora Blanket I then started to look for names that had a connection to the word Aurora. Bonnie is such an avid reader - most of here skeins are named after book titles, characters or book events. This got me thinking about the story of Aurora from Sleeping Beauty. Merryweather was one of Aurora's Fairy Godmothers. This was the perfect name as this blanket was almost like a Fairy Godmother to the Quilt pattern (rather than the usual "sister quilt" title given to quilts from the same design family). And so the perfect name for this design was given - the Merryweather Blanket.
The Merryweather Blanket pattern with its Half Square Triangle Granny Squares are the star of this design. This blanket can be made in so many colour combinations, colour order in a rainbow, use an Ombre effect, make it scrappy or even two toned.
It is suitable for the Confident Beginner - Magic ring, single crochet, double crochet, double crochet decrease, changing yarn colour, Mattress stitch join. Crab Stitch border. Written in US Terms (Crochet Stitch Terms Conversion info sheet included). The pattern includes colour instructions and illustrations as well as a Colouring Page so you can work up your design on the page first. The Finished size – 52in x 52in (132cm x 132cm)
And because you have never have too much bling - here I have added tassels to each corner of this Blanket.
Happy Quilting - well in this case - crocheting!
Jemima x
