Wednesday, 24 February 2016

Northern Zealand Blanket - starting out (Tunisian Full Stitch)

I’ve really looked forward to starting this blanket. I don’t have much experience with Tunisian crochet (check out my one other blanket here), but I love the texture you get with Tunisian crochet – and it really lends itself well to lots of different color combinations, I think will look great. This blanket will be made using the Tunisian full stitch.

(See final blanket and free pattern here)

www.greenteaandgiraffes.com

Of course there is the issue of crochet hooks – especially when crocheting blankets using Tunisian. Then it is crucial to invest in the crochet hooks with long ‘tubes’ attached to them. But luckily that does not have to be a costly affair. I found mine on Ebay for about US$ 6 including shipment (to Denmark). The packet included 12 crochet hooks – 3 mm – 10 mm – all with a 1.2 m tube attached to it. Now this may not sound like it will be big enough for the length of a blanket, but a tube of that length can actually hold quite a few chains, so you can still produce a blanket that is quite large.


www.greenteaandgiraffes.com

I have only ever crocheted one blanket using the ‘standard’ Tunisian crochet stitch – and one headband – but it is my experience, as well as what I have picked up when researching Tunisian crochet, that you should normally go up a size in terms of the crochet hook compared to what you would normally use for the type of yarn you have chosen. In this case, I crocheted a little sample and found out that I got the best texture when I used a 4.5 mm crochet hook – I am using yarn that, according to the label, would require a 4.0 mm hook.

www.greenteaandgiraffes.com

For this blanket I am planning on using a mix of blue, green and brown colors – doing just one row of each color. As you can see from one of the pictures, this leaves me with a lot of loose ends on the right side of the blanket (due to the fact that you never turn the blanket when you crochet it). I haven’t quite decided how I am going to deal with the loose ends, - but I think I will do a bit of research on how best to hide them when the blanket is closer to being finished. If you have any advice on this matter, I would love to hear from you.

If you also want to get started on a blanket using this pattern then I will soon publish a written photo tutorial on how to crochet it.

Find this blanket on my Ravelry profile here.

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