crochet mood blanket 2014

Well …. let’s just say there’s a first for everything …..
Soooo, how about a “Follow-up Friday”-post on a Saturday?

For a pretty organised and control-freakish kind of person like me, it was a big step to accept that “no”, I was not going to finish my “Crochet Mood Blanket”, ànd take photos of it, ànd put a blog post together yesterday…..
maRRose - CCC --- Crochet Mood Blanket-54 It was something Quinn said, that made it clear to me that this was actually ok – thank you, sweetheart!
On a totally non-related side-track: this sweetheart and I had a great time yesterday evening, attending the opening of the “Munch : Van Gogh” exhibition in the “Van Gogh Museum”……(oh, and this youTube-film is absolutely wonderful; informative is this one).
This is Quinn and I in the “Munch – The Scream”-photo booth at the exhibition; to activate the camera, you had to literally ‘scream’ ……

But: without further ado, let me present to you my “Crochet Mood Blanket”; started in 2014, finally finished in September of 2015!

If you want to read back as to how and why this blanket was begun, this is where you’ll want to go.
The pattern I used can be found here, with a little note that I adjusted the rectangle a tiny bit, so that two short sides had the same size as its long side. This allowed me to play around with the lay-out of the squares, when I commenced the joining.

Quite some thinking went into the border. At first I thought a simple border would be best for this colorful piece of crochet, but after a couple of tries I went for a more elaborate one and am absolutely happy with the way it turned out. “Boho” comes to mind, when I look at this blanket.

For the border I went down 0,5 mm to a 3 mm hook and did a simple round of black dc’s (UK: trebles). Second round with green was a sc (UK: dc) in between every 4th and 5th dc from the previous round, chain 3 – and repeated all around. Third round – with black again – I crocheted 4 dc’s in every chain3-loop (you can find a great tutorial for this so-called “block-stitch” here).
Inspired by this beautiful border on Ryane’s latest blanket , I crocheted two rounds (in orange and pink) using this stitch, and I love how these rounds give some reliëf to the border.
The last 3 rounds were an exact copy of the first 3, the bright blue being the accent color here.
When I posted this photo on Instagram, someone asked me why I was crocheting on three rounds at the same time? I do this to get a feel for the final lay-out – it’s not until I like what I see that I go ahead and crochet all around my blanket/cushion cover.
The details:
* number of squares: “only” 192 instead of 365 ….
* weight: 1248 grams (2 lbs, 12 oz)
* size: 115 x 225 cm (45,3 x 88,5 inches)
* yarn: all 100% cotton (Katia, Catania, Cotton8, Phildar, etc)

Do I like it? Oh, yesss! I’m very happy with the result. Also: very happy to have finished another old-wip. If I’m correct there’s only 3 projects left on the wip-list: the “Rustic Lace Square”-blanket – which is an ongoing project, so not really counting. Secondly, the Simply Crochet Squares (still no idea what to do with them …..). And then I need to write down the pattern for the square I designed to make my “Les Tourettes”-shawl.
The end is near ……

There’s one more thing I want to share here: my 4 favorites of last week’s “Craft As Therapy“-theme:
Top left: Mariana‘s beautiful crochet hexagon blanket;
Top right: Corinne‘s stunning hexi puffs/bee keepers quilt;
Bottom left: Sarah‘s gorgeous knitted, double sided baby blanket;
Bottom right: Tina‘s very uniqe and fabulously made candy skull lead picture.

Next week I’m taking a short break, having been invited by my brother and his husband to come and visit them in Cannes: how awesome is that?!
Wishing you a wonderful weekend and week ahead!
Love,
Marianne xx

Being an avid “instagrammer”, I came across the hashtag #crochetmoodblanket2014 a lot (and I mean a LOT) at the end of 2013. Pretty soon I understood that the lovely Stacey Wentford-Hall was the big instigator of this nifty idea. And pretty soon there were a lot (and I mean a LOT) of people who thought highly of this idea as well and “it went viral”, as we say nowadays.

Doing the “Crochet Mood Blanket 2014”, means that you will crochet (or knit) one square a day (or per week), the colors of which will reflect the mood that you’re in that day/week, or that just appeal to you at the time of crocheting/knitting.
And it just does not have to be squares, some people are crocheting (knitting) the kind of blanket where you’ll be adding 1 row (per day/week and of course also in your mood color(s) of that particular day/week).

You can read about the “Crochet Mood Blanket 2014” and why Stacey wanted to do a project like this at Stacey’s blog, that she has just started, but also in the online interview that Monica (of the “Mon Makes Things”- blog) did with Stacey.
There’s also a fantastic and lively “Crochet Mood Blanket 2014” group on Facebook, where cmb-ers from all over the world share their progress, help and encourage each other. At this moment there are more than 2700 members, and I’m sure this number will even get bigger over time.

The big question was of course “am I going to join or not”. Gut feeling: a big yes, but my wip control side of the brain made me hesitate. I did not want to jump in, just to find one more piece of crochet abandoned in a corner of my craft room after a couple of weeks. Sooo ….. I made a plan and got all organised, haha!

First of all I got a notebook, that I’ve dedicated to this project, keeping track of my moods on a daily basis, determining the color or color-combo depicting that mood each day. Nice side effect is that I now have some sort of diary too – I like that!
Then I searched the web, trying to learn a little about the meaning/feeling of colors – for instance here, here and here, which was really interesting – I liked that too!
I selected the colors and moods that I thought would work for me and jotted them down in aforementioned notebook.
And finally I decided on the design of the blanket-to-be itself. Since I had already promised myself to start a blanket following a different pattern/idea (will blog about that project soon), I knew it had to be squares. Also, I wanted to do the 365, one square per day.
And how wonderful a source is the internet, because pinned to one of my own Pinterest-boards, was this different kind of square that I immediately knew THIS was going to be my “Crochet Mood Blanket 2014”-square.
The rectangle square, that I had found a long time ago on Susan’s truly great and inspirational blog “Crochet Again” (please visit, you will not regret, I promise) is the pattern for my CMB-blanket.
I adapted the pattern just a tiny bit (I’m omitting one cluster of trebles and chain 18 instead of 21, in order for two squares together to have the same length as the longer side of one square).

So ….. without further ado, here’s the first part of my “Crochet Mood Blanket 2014”!
Black is the color that I will join (as I go) with and I’m really pleased how the black frames the little squares and makes the colors pop.
So far, I’ve crocheted my mood squares every 4 of 5 days; easy, since my notebook tells me what color(s) to use for which day.
Happy I’ve joined this project/community! Every once in a while I’ll show you my progress here – fun times!