A Puzzle Blanket of Memories

My second and biggest crochet project was a striped blanket for our living room couch. The stripes look random, and there isn’t a visible pattern to it, but there is meaning to every single stripe. I used special dates in our lives to decide on the number of crochet rows for each stripe. It’s been long enough since I made the blanket that I forgot what order I put the dates, and now it’s a puzzle every time I count the rows to figure out which represents what significant date. 

Other than my unusual way of determining stripes, there were 2 other stipulations: I wanted to make a blanket big enough for 2 people; and be super warm without having to fold it in half. That meant a whole lot of yarn (I don’t even remember how many skeins), and using a double crochet stitch. It took forever to make, but turned out just as I wanted.

Determining Stripe Widths

Stripe widths were based on each number in the date. As an example, say your anniversary is 5 July 2005, I’d crochet 5 rows in one color, 7 in the next, and 5 for the last. 

I thought that making stripes of more than 10 rows would make the blanket look more uneven then it may already appear. So if anything was 11 or more I would separate the number into 2 stripes. For example if your birthday is 23 November 1982, instead of crocheting stripes of 23 rows, 12 rows and 82 rows, I would do stripes of 2, 3, 1, 1, 8 and 2 rows. This also added to the puzzle when figuring the dates out later.

Almost Even Colors

To make the color usage as even throughout as possible I made a list of dates; figured out the rows sizes; organized the dates so that each color had as close to the same number of rows as possible; and assigned the colors to each row.

Finishing

To finish I did a row of each color around the blanket.

The final product is exactly what I wanted, plus a little more:

1. Warm

2. Big enough for two people

3. A puzzle to go down memory lane

4. A conversation piece when people visit 

I'm not sure I'll tackle a project this big any time soon, but it would be nice to revisit when more important dates get added to our lives.

REPOSTED FROM A MUCH OLDER BLOG.