And surprise, surprise, I made them blankets! Not very inventive I know but a great deal of thought went into their inception and creation and I'm thrilled with the results :-)
Thea's came first-simply because I already knew what I wanted to do for hers. A blanket inspired by rainbows with a pink-and-white border.
Sadly, my pictures don't do the colours justice-they're very, very bright! But my sister has two gorgeous little girls who I'm sure like their colours loud :-)
I like this slightly out-of-focus photo as the colours blend together. I have very bad eyesight so when I looked at the blanket without my glasses on, it looked really beautiful.
Now, Jess's blanket took a lot more thinking! I didn't have a concrete theme but I decided to go with her favourite colours (blue and purple) along with green as I'm not sure what her other half likes colour-wise. These colours are the dominate ones, along with some contrasting/accentuating combinations. For Jessica's blanket, I also wanted to expand my square knowledge and learnt how to make lots of different motifs!
I grouped the squares into fours, crocheted them together and bordered them in white, then crocheted them into fours and did another white border, then crocheted each strip together and put a massive border around it...
For the border (on both blankets), I struggled with the joins but then I came across this tutorial which explains how to use what she calls 'flat border cluster' in really easy to follows photos and directions, so simple, even I could do it!
I posted them both on the same day-and despite the fact they were going to opposite parts of England, they both arrived within a day of each other to the complete surprise of my gorgeous sisters who seem to really like them :-)
They're hopefully both big enough for each family to snuggle up in on cold days and it gives me a huge amount of delight to think of my loved ones cuddled up in my blankets XD
Many of the square motifs came from this web page and I barely scratched the surface :-) I also used a couple of the free patterns that this lovely lady shares on her blog.
So that's it for these blankets! They were a lot of fun to make and while I'm a bit sad to see them go, I'm so happy that they have families of their own :-)
