Fluffy White Clouds

I've been friends with Vikki ever since we started our PhDs way way back and she is one of my favourite people.  The patterns she designs are gorgeous (and I've even had a pair of socks named after me).  Her most popular pattern is Fluffy White Clouds, a design I have long admired.  It's not one I've ever made, though, as it is knitted using intarsia and that is not a technique of which I am a fan.  I used it for knitting the Sincerely Louise faux taxidermy heads and of course the tiger rug, but as a technique on a smaller scale, it's not for me.

So when Vikki said she was going to design the crochet version of Fluffy White Clouds, and could I test it for her, I was very enthusiastic!  I've knitted a (non-intarsia-featuring) blanket by her before (actually, quite a few versions of Pargetry) and I knew it would be clear, helpful, and well-written.

The pattern was soon emailed to me, with both a coloured chart (nope, not for me) and written row-by-row instructions (I much prefer words to pictures).  I'd ordered the yarn (Paintbox Aran, as Vikki suggests), I found my bobbins and a crochet hook and off I went.

It's a mini corner to corner (C2C) blanket, meaning you start in the bottom right hand corner and work diagonally until you reach the top left hand corner.  It was a new-to-me technique, but easy enough to pick up.

I thoroughly enjoyed crocheting this.  It was great fun to see the clouds forming and the yarn (a brand I've not used before) is soft to work with.  When I knitted the tiger rug, which had a lot of colour changes for the stripes, I couldn't use bobbins as the yarn was so thick (super chunky held double) there was no point - I just had balls and balls in bags for life at my feet, restricting my movement!  But I soon got to grips with using bobbins, keeping the yarn neatly in place for when I needed it on the next row.

Some of my colour changes are a bit dodgy, and some of the edges of the clouds aren't as neat as they could be - this is entirely my error, despite me knowing all about the importance of colour changes from making plenty of Ed's Animals!  Vikki does provide instructions for how to change colour, however, so there is a lesson in reading the pattern thoroughly to begin with.

Warning: this blanket involves approximately a billion ends.  I cannot tell you how many ends I had to deal with, but it was a lot.  I was very good and kept sewing them in as I went along, until I got to the last few rows when I just wanted to finish, and left rather a lot, which took me nearly two hours to sort out!  Let's not dwell on that.

My blanket has come out slightly bigger than the pattern suggests, which again is entirely down to me as I didn't properly check my tension before I began.  I used the suggested 5.5mm hook, when I had an inkling I should use a 5mm hook, but in all honesty I couldn't find one, so I kept going with the 5.5mm one instead.  This also meant that I had to ever so slightly change the border, but this is my fault and wouldn't have happened had I checked my tension (which is what Vikki tells you to do!).  So my apologies to the designer.  I also ended up using more yarn, but of course this would happen as I was using a bigger hook than I needed.

My work has a lunchtime craft club once a week, where we sit and chat and craft away (SUCH a good idea, set up by a professor all in the name of staff and student well-being), and I brought in this blanket for 'show and tell'.  It was much admired, by crafters and non-crafters alike.  Several of my friends are expecting summer babies, and this is going to one of them.  It wasn't a particularly hard blanket to crochet, just a bit fiddly in the middle section when the rows are long with lots of bits of cloud and the associated colour changes, and it's not the most portable of projects.  The end result is gorgeous though, and I'm confident its new owners will be appreciative.  I have no doubt that it's a blanket I'll make again, although not for a while - I need a rest from sewing in all those ends!