Work in Progress – Peacock Blanket

If you follow me on Facebook or Instagram, you might know that I’m working on a big crochet project. I found the pattern on Ravelry – it’s a beautiful Peacock Blanket, and it will take me some time to finish.

Is this a good time to mention that you can find all my social media links on the right side of the blog? Click on any of those black and white icons to see what I’m up to when I’m not blogging (hint: I’m crocheting).

Before I could start the blanket, I had to learn to crochet. Nothing like starting out with an easy one, right? Here’s a demonstration of how my skills have progressed:

The stitches on the left are the newest ones, where I’m starting to figure out what individual stitches look like, and how to crochet through the right parts of the stitch to get the finished result I want. The right hand side is looser, less even, generally a bit muddled. Progress! I might make another sample swatch before I start on the blanket proper, but for now I’m working on the feathers.

The blanket is made in two stages – one is blanket itself, in the pattern above (though neater, of course), and the other is the feathers, which are stitched evenly on to the reverse side. I’ll have to make 102 of these, a seemingly vast number. That said, I’ve made 14 in the last week – only another 7.2 weeks to go, at this rate. Plus blanket time… At present they take almost an hour apiece – I hope I’ll get faster as I go along. I think I might still be making my stitches too tight, they’re tricky to get the hook into. Still, they’re coming out well! They’re all a little different – while there’s part of me that would like exact uniformity, it’s nice to see a bit of character emerging in each feather. I love the colours.

I am still firmly in the ‘learn by doing’ camp, but I did have one practise run with spare yarn, after I’d spent some time on the practise swatch above. There were a lot of different stitches to learn – the blanket itself uses single and double crochet, multiple double crochets in the same stitch, and cluster stitches. The feathers use a magic loop, single crochet, double crochet, half double crochet and triple crochet. I mean… half double crochet. To the layperson, that makes no sense whatsoever. Luckily, the internet is there to help me through.

That’s as far as we’ve got. Hopefully the next time you see the blanket, I’ll have finished at least one part of the process. Stay tuned…