It's Finished!

These past few weeks I have been working on a blanket inspired by this photo I saw posted on Facebook:

 

 

The same day I saw it, my son's friend had posted as his status, "I like M&M's". Very random, but nonetheless, I reposted the picture, letting him know I was "thinking of him". His response? "Can you make me one?"

OF Course I can!!!!!

 And this is it!

What do ya think?

I love it!

 This was a fun project to complete, and I learned more about working this type of project.

Some people run the colors between eachother as they stitch, ie-If the white is the outside color, they stitch over the brown, carrying it along as they stitch, and vice versa.

I have tried this method before, and beside the fact that it uses twice as much yarn as necessary to complete the project, I found the color underneath to still be slightly visible when stitching over it, especially if one is dark and the other light, as in this project. Its kinda like weaving in a black piece of yarn in a section of white. 

Now I know that method does have its place for certain projects and probably certain types of yarns, but I decided not to leave this order to chance.

I chose to make this blanket another way, changing colors on the hook as I went and crocheting normally, without trying to be hiding the other strand as I went.

On the last stitch before a color change, I add in the new color and drop the old color for the last "yarn over, pull through the loops". (Similar to the way you would at the end of a row and changing color).  On the next row when I get to a color change again, I just grab the color I need to switch to from the row beneath that has that same color, and work it till the next color change.
From the first row of white up to the top of the M where all three segments of white join together, I was working seven balls of yarn: brown, white, brown, white, brown, white, brown for each section of color in the blanket at that point. The yarn in the back never went further than one row up from where it was before. 

This picture here shows the back of the afghan.
You can see easily where the white was carried up from row to row.

 So, how did I get the pattern you may wonder? Basically, I copied and pasted a photo from off the internet, printed it onto a piece of graph paper, and then further tweaked the printed picture a bit to make sure every line was where it should be, every angle coinciding with the other angles on the graph.

 

For something more intricate, you may even go as far as hand copying the pattern over again onto another piece of graph paper. I had to do that for my first project I ever made.

(This was stitched with sc, one square for each sc, simply because of the small size of the project.)

The M&M blanket was stitched in half double crochet, rather than most I've seen like this that have been done in double crochet. I just like the final fabric of it better.

Each square used on the graph paper represented two rows, and two stitches in each of those rows.

The only downfall to using the half double crochet rather than the double crochet is that the 2X2 stitches are not as perfectly square as they are when worked on double crochet, but for a project such as this, it was easy to add in a few extra rows on top to compensate for this.

 Pretty nifty, huh?

I will definitely be making more projects like this. The final result is a pretty impressive looking piece to be proud of.

Well, that is all for now. Thanks for stopping by!

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Have a LOVEly day!

Love all you do, and those you have, with all your heart!