GUEST POST: Carole Marie's Vinicunca Blanket

Happy new year everyone!! 

We have a treat for you today - a guest post from Carole of Carole Marie Designs! We absolutely adore Carole's colourful, geometric designs, and recently she was inspired by Michelle's Bargello Baby Blanket to create a crazy zig zag of bargello called the Vinicunca Blanket. We asked her to write a little bit about her design process, and it is absolutely fascinating to get a peek into a designer's brain!

And, just for our wonderful readers, Carole is offering  her Vinicunca Blanket pattern to us for free until next Tuesday, 9 January 2018!! 

Head to https://www.ravelry.com/patterns/library/vinicunca and use the code vinim 

Thank you Carole!

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Where did Vinicunca come from?  Well thats easy really, it came from the Michelle’s Bargello pattern and a frustrating moment of not being able to control my tension.  Michelle and I share an interest in the formation of Bargello, Michelle in stitching, myself in the quilting form. The other thing I love is colour, bright rainbow colour so it seemed the right moment to have a bit of a play.  However my play wasn't working, tension issues.  I don't know why but I couldn't close the gap, it just wasn’t happening.  So I sat for a while getting more and more frustrated ready for throwing my hook into the naughty corner, when I realised that maybe I could turn single stitches into clusters instead and see if that worked.  Well easier said than done.  MATHS!  Another favourite of mine, I like to play with numbers.  

So then here’s Michelle pattern, to make the clusters sit right I would need to make the beginning chain 3 lengths longer... heck hold on ... its going to big.   Well OK sorted out the starting chain, applied Michelle’s technique and got cracking.   WHOOPS hold on.... now I had a long BUT skinny piece of work, well that was no use for a blanket.  Ermmm... got to work this out now, again a couple of hours of frustration playing around with stitches and how to make my blanket fatter (I only do fat blankets).  

Then hey presto a mad moment of thinking: What if I could reverse and mirror image the pattern. making sure the same colours sat on top of each other?  Again I had to play around with the stitches how could I work this backwards so everything sat at the right ?  I think on the 4th attempt I had worked it out so off I went again.  Once that second part was finished it was looking fatter but still a rectangle PLUS I still had half of my 12 colours left, I don't like to waste yarn, if I can I'll use a full ball of yarn.  So off I went again mirroring the pattern until 4 sections had been finished.  Still some yarn left so applied a simple border with all 12 colours and finished off with the dreaded crab stitch.

It was a real tah da moment for myself, a pleasing journey of creativity.  Of course I had to show it off and asked Michelle if I could write the pattern up and publish it.  And wonderfully she said yes. Then inspired by some of my closest crochet friends, the blanket was named Vinicunca, representing the mountains in Peru.  

This also meant that after a long period of time I had my 50th pattern to publish.  It had been such a long time, because of opening my own yarn shop that I had published anything.

This is what happens when you Crochet Between Worlds, you make great creative friends willing to share techniques and design ideas.