Rippling along

 
I've been crocheting away on my ripple blanket for a while now. It's a bit of a mammoth project - a wavy chevrons crochet pattern to fit a king sized bed! I used a random stripe generator for the pattern and change colour every two rows. If you want someone to do all the hard work for you, it's an excellent way to make a stripey pattern. You can choose your colour palette and the thicknesses of the stripes. The permutations are endless and it is addictive! - you'll wonder where the night has gone once you start playing!

I usually like the randomness of choosing colours as I go along, but its a new gadget - and has to be tried! I do find myself saying"I wouldn't have put those colours next to each other" and "the pink came around again fast..." BUT I do like the way it makes you push that safety zone a little. It would be a good project to use up the small balls left in your stash but I felt since I was investing so much time in this project, it deserved a bit more effort on my part as I will look at it when its done and think "I should have just got another ball of magenta. That one odd stripe stands out like a sore thumb!" And it will bug me every time I look at it. I know it. It's happened before....

The pattern is adapted from Soft Waves by Jan Eaton. If you want a direct link to the book at amazon click on the book cover.I've linked to the amazon.com  page as you can see inside the book on this one - a certain soft waves pattern is featured so you can have a good look if you're thinking of trying this pattern out yourself.

So, my blanket is now over halfway and climbing slowly towards the pillows! Once you get going, you can watch tv and depending how fast - and confident - you are, you can get about 3 or 4 rows done during a film. I average about 30 - 45mins per row but I do end up making a few mistakes when I'm not concentrating. This may seem painstaking but it is my 'doing something when I'm watching tv ' project so I don't mind. And each row does have over 500 stitches - I lost count but the repeat is there so -hey! I'm not the perfectionist I once was. Now it's "can I be bothered ripping back two rows? Nah! no-one will notice that little mistake!!  If it's for me, then 'no'. If I were to sell it? Rip, rip, rip. rip..........

Getting there....

Any visual progress on the ripple can be seen on my flickr page. You can also click on the flickr link on the top right of the page if you like. There is  a group 'ripplealong' if you want to see other ripples or if you want to take part in a group. There is also a group set of photos on flickr which you can access from the ripplealong site.

Anyway, the ripple is calling and I feel another few rows needing to be crocheted. "Are you sitting comfortably? (munchies, good film, yarn at the ready), then we'll begin........."