Ali’s Sunflower Blanket

Pigskin Party Notes

Pro-Shop Non-Exclusives

Yarn – I am using a TON of FDW leftovers and a few random minis for this project, as well as other dyers’ yarns, both leftovers and some minis (most of which I do not have labels for at this point, so I’ll be grouping them all under “Other”). The only full skeins I am using are the Plain Vanilla Bounce and Mountain Tweed for the borders and joins. I am keeping track of all of the leftovers in a separate spreadsheet including the grams used for each one. I’ll add the itemized yarns to my Rav project page for the sake of my PSP entry, but I won’t be adding them here since there is no easy way to do that. I can tell you that I used 49 different FDW yarns, plus a lot of other dyers’ yarns.

12/11 – Just finished my spreadsheet accounting. 49 entries. I’ll be adding 49 entries. 48 of them are FDW yarn, thus they are Pro Shop Sponsor Non-Exclusives. Tomorrow. I’ll be adding them all tomorrow because I’m too tired right now. LOL

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11/16 – I’ve finally started this blanket. My sunflower blocks are using the Sunflower Bloom Blanket pattern by Sian Brock.

After trying both fingering held double and just a single strand of DK, I’ve decided to go with fingering held double because I love the depth of color that results.

I’m planning to make as much of this blanket as possible out of leftovers/partial skeins that I have on hand, both of my own yarn as well as other dyers. The border colors (Mt Tweed BFL and Bounce, both in Plain Vanilla) I will probably need to add to because I don’t have a lot of partials in my stash, especially of Bounce.

11/21 – Up to 13 squares! I love how they’re turning out. I’m weaving in ends as I finish each square so that isn’t an overwhelming task at the end.

11/26 – I’ve mapped out the blanket layout and it will use 28 flower squares in a 7 x 11 square layout. I’m planning for the other 49 squares to be in the linen stitch from the Little Squares Crochet Blanket. I still have to figure out how the borders are going to work for that since the sunflower squares will already have white borders but the linen stitch squares will not. I’ll probably work that out as I’m going though. One option might be to do a Granny border around the linen squares instead of the linen stitch border the pattern calls for. I’d like it to look as cohesive as possible. Fingers crossed I can make it work!

11/28 – All 28 sunflower blocks are finished. I love them so much! The first 18 are blocked, but I can start joining them with the linen stitch segments now while I get the remaining blocks…blocked. 😉

Note – I stuck the blocking picture in after the original picture of 13 because the lighting is so bad for it, but I wanted to show how I blocked them. I drew out a 4×4 grid of 5″ squares on one of my blocking mats and then pinned the squares out. Once they were soaked, they’d pretty much opened up to 5″ on their own, so the blocking was mostly for making the corners crisp and straightening out the edges. It worked really well!

12/2 – I have the first and over half of the second strip joined. The linen stitch plan did not work out. It just didn’t look right with the flower squares. Instead I’m doing granny stripe squares, 9 rows, with one row of the natural color in between two colored ones. Joining to one side of the flower squares is a little tricky and doesn’t look the same as starting from the edge of a flower square, but after a couple different tries, I am happy enough with what I’m doing.

12/3 – I finished the second strip last night. I also laid out all of the sunflower squares and arranged them how I was them to go and then assigned each granny stripes space a specific color. I stacked everything up so that as I work on the strips, I’ll know what color to use rather than just choosing as I go and winging it as far as the sunflowers being laid out so that there aren’t the same colors super close to each other. It’s kind of a plan.

I know technically this project is over half done since all of the sunflower squares are complete, but it feels like there’s so much more to do, even though the strips and granny stripes are moving along pretty quickly. Then there will be the joining of the strips and a border around the whole thing.

Running Square Completion Tally
12/3 – 46 (59%)
12/4 – 49 (63%)
12/5 – 56 (72%)
12/6 – 74 (96%)
12/7 – 77 (100%)

At this point, I’m considering the project at 90% since I still need to join the strips and do the border.

12/7 – All seven strips are done. Will start joining them tomorrow.

12/10 – Finished! I had to fix one spot in my first strip where I forgot to do the neutral granny stripe, but that wasn’t a big deal. Joining the strips was a bit more of an ordeal than I thought it would be, only because keeping the blocks lined up was not easy since the flower blocks and the granny stripe “blocks” weren’t really the same size. I had to stop just about every block and make sure things were good. But it all worked out, and I’m pretty happy with the result! I know there are errors, but no one else probably will. LOL The border went quickly, just being granny clusters.

I have all of my yarns in a spreadsheet, which I’m going to add in here so I have an accurate accounting of the FDW yarns I used, but I’m grouping all of the other yarns just as “other” because I really don’t know what most of them were anyway, being scraps/leftovers in my leftovers bin. :}