new obsession: ripple crocheted blankets
When I was growing up we had a cheezy “colonial” style couch with a yellow-brownish plaid upholstery and wooden arms. Draped across the top of it was a ripple crocheted blanket that my grandma made, that faded from brown to orange to yellow and back again. It was hideous. Because of that memory (or in spite of it?) I suddenly fell in love with the ripple blanket at Posie Gets Cozy by Alicia Paulson. The colors seem so modern — sort of Paul Smith meets Missoni — but it’s still warm and sincere. From Alicia’s site I discovered the No End In Sight Ripple Along blog that the Head Mistress of Ripple maintains. There are so many beautiful blankets being made there, it’s almost overwhelming. My dilemma is that I can’t imagine having the time to take on blanket project and grandma retired her needle long ago. Perhaps a crafty friend would volunteer to make me one — I’d even pay! Sigh. See more vibrant blankets at this flickr group. Has anyone ever made a ripple blanket? How long do they take? — Angela M.
April 9th, 2007 at 11:10 am
I haven’t crocheted a ripple blanket, but I did make a herringbone pattern once, that was a double-size.
I worked at it about 45 minutes every night for nearly five months. It was my first and last crocheting project. Zzzz.
April 9th, 2007 at 2:16 pm
I’ve made several small baby blankets, and they took me a long while, but I didn’t devote any set amount of time to them. Of course they seem to go faster if you don’t have to change colors all the time, so I tend to make solid colored blankets.
Crochetting is a good thing to do while you’re watching TV, especially once you have the patterned memorized so you don’t have to keep looking at the book all the time.
April 12th, 2007 at 6:44 pm
My mom used to whip out those ripple blankets like nobody’s business! We called them afghans or throws, but they’re the same thing. She’d use leftover yarn of various shades if the blanket was for us to use at home, and if it was going to be a gift, the blanket was often monochromatic or two colors. Now that she’s gone, I’m glad we have the eclectic afghans.
She did a lot of knitting and crocheting in the evenings while the rest of us watched TV, so she got to be quite speedy. She didn’t enjoy doing complicated patterns, and I think she had fun with the ripple blankets, so they must not be too difficult. Good luck! You can always stop when you get tired of it and still put the finished product to good use.
April 12th, 2007 at 11:27 pm
These are usually called chevron patterns in stitch books (at least, the lower one, with the pointier ripples, is). You can do this in crochet or knitting, but crochet is usually faster than knitting, particularly at a large gauge. These take a while, and yes, they are an easy pattern; I think they’re formed with minimal increases and decreases. They look more complicated than they really are.
Donna Kooler has a book of crocheted afghan patterns, and this is probably in it. If not, almost any book with a bunch of crochet stitches should have several variations on it. You won’t have to look hard for some kind of pattern.
If you make one or have one made, research the amounts of yarn needed for something that size (a pattern will tell you, a stitch book won’t), choose the yarns you like the in store, lay them out together in the order you’re considering to see how they look. You might, for example, want an A-B-A-C sort of stripe pattern; the percentage of the blanket in each color is going to affect the amount of yarn you need. If you want something with as many different stripes as this, you want to just buy one or two balls of each color (depending on the yarn and size of the ball).
I would recommend making something like this in a washable synthetic blend or in a superwash (machine-washable) wool, because it would be a pain to hand-wash. There are many wonderful, soft, 100% natural yarns that would be lousy for blankets. If you want it in cotton, use a cotton-acrylic blend, because plain cotton is inelastic. That means that it can get saggy over time, and also that working with it to make something can be really hard on your hands. (With crochet, the latter is more of a concern than the former. I wouldn’t want to make a blanket out of denim yarn, for example.) The patternworks.com catalogue has lots of options, & you can order inexpensive shade cards from them too, which would let you play along with color combos before you decided and started on the project or got your friend started.
My grandmother made all kinds of crocheted afghans; one I remember was a chevron pattern in alternating black and variegated-rainbow stripes. (Like Red Heart’s “Mexicana” colorway - she always used acrylic yarn.) Another is the one I was sitting under on the sofa this evening, granny squares in a combination of white and bright pinks. I got in a car accident last month, and have been spending a lot of time with that afghan as a result. Whiplash sucks slightly less in a PINK afghan and Nick & Nora unicorn pajamas.
April 12th, 2007 at 11:29 pm
Sorry, I said, “If you want something with as many different stripes as this, you want to just buy one or two balls of each color (depending on the yarn and size of the ball).”
By “this,” I was referring to the photos you posted, not to the 50-25-25 yarn percentage blanked I had just been talking about!
April 25th, 2007 at 7:42 pm
Hi
Why not make one with the biggest(thickest) wool and crochet hook your can manage?
Do strips, not too wide and easy to carry around, and then you can join these together over time and make a bigger rug, should you get past the first strip
No harm in trying
April 29th, 2007 at 12:35 am
Making something like this in very thick wool would be pretty expensive, actually, compared to making something the same size in worsted-weight wool. (For the purposes of this comment, wool=yarn. Some knitting books use the terms interchangeably, whether the yarn is actually made of wool or not!)
In Elizabeth Zimmermann’s “Knitter’s Almanac,” she has a little riff on the “how much wool do I need for a sweater?” question. What she says is something like, “If it’s very fine wool, surprisingly little. If it’s thick wool, more than you can possibly imagine.” Since yarn is sold by weight, you get much less yardage of fat wool in a 50g ball than you would of a thinner wool. Superbulky yarns tend to be more expensive by the ball than finer ones to begin with, and they aren’t always easier to work with. You could easily spend two or three times as much making a blanket in thick wool than thin.
Incidentally, if you knit and crochet similar items, the crochet version will also always use up much more yarn than the knit version. But while there are both knit and crochet versions of the chevron pattern, the ones shown here in the photos are both crocheted. (And they both look to me like they were made in worsted weight yarn, which is very common - Wool Ease, Red Heart, and Simply Soft are some of the better-known craft store versions. I think the bottom photo is probably made in cheaper yarns, because of that camo pattern in one of the stripes on the far left, as well as some of the other variegated stripes.)
If you were interested in knitting something like this, I’d look into the “feather and fan” pattern, which is simple lace that creates gentle ripples. When it’s done, it has a nice drape and is cozy as a result. It doesn’t look just like these chevrons, but it’s good.