Draped over a chair

A friend of mine is having some health problems at the moment, and as well as more practical support (like walking her dog from time to time), I wanted to make her something. When my Dad died a friend made me a crocheted elephant, and this little elephant acted as a reminder that she cared. I wanted to offer the same thing to my friend, but I also wanted to make her something practical. As her illness will involve some enforced resting, I thought some form of sofa blanket/shawl thing would work best.

I started it the day she had surgery, and finished it just about 6 weeks later. Fastest blanket ever. But I wanted to make sure it was ready for when she needed it. Last night she popped around to help us distract the dog from the fireworks, and so I handed it over to her.

I chose purple as it’s one of her favourite colours. I chose a 100% acrylic yarn because she’s vegan. (In actuality, it is probably 99.9% acrylic and 0.1% dog fur as the dog insisted on trying it out whilst it was being made!)

I chose this pattern as it seemed relatively straightforward and had some good ratings on ravelry. I opted for hdcs instead of dcs for the non-shell row as I liked how this looked more when I sampled it. It was a great tv-watching project and seemed to grow really quickly. I finished it with a single border of scs and used just over 7 balls of the yarn.

Texture

It ended up being a fairly decent size, as you can see from the picture below. It didn’t end up being quite square, even after steam blocking it, but it looks ok, and most importantly, feels like it’ll be soft, warm and comforting. And that’s the whole point.

Richard holds the blanket to give a sense of scale