Moorland Wreath

If you’ve ever visited here before then you’ll know I love wreaths very much!

You may also know that I haven’t yet finished the Attic24 crochet a long (CAL) blanket from 2015

So when Lucy announced the Moorland Blanket CAL as tempted as I was by another blanket my mind immediately went to wreaths.  I could easily visualise the colours which she had chosen wrapping around in a circle and representing the landscape of the moors.  It seemed an obvious next step to put the most recognisable resident of the the North Yorkshire Moors nestling inside. So I made a Swaledale Sheep!

I had made a sheep wearing a rainbow jumper for the charity fundraising flock at Yarndale and you can see her here and so I used that pattern as a basis for the body adding rows here and there and using aran weight yarn to make a sheep the right size.  I made up  carefully designed the head myself to add the white nose and get a bigger size and used knitted icords to make the distinctive horns. Oh and instead of a colourful jumper this sheep got long shaggy hair!

*** 16th FEBRUARY EDITED TO ADD – the sheep pattern is now available here – Swaledale Sheep Pattern ***

Then it was a case of the wreath base.  Lucy has a stunning photo on her blog here of Yorkshire moorland with narrow stripes of crochet in the colours she selected for her blanket in her perfect words “tell[ing] a visual story of the landscape that inspired them” and this was the strip of colour I saw wrapping around my polystyrene base.  I started with all good intentions of waiting for her to reveal the colour order on her blog. Until I crocheted the first 20 stripes and then sat impatiently considering waiting a week for the next colours!

Everyone else is making blankets and that obviously takes a lot longer than an 18cm wide piece of single crochet! I studied the photo and took my best guess at the colours and went it alone.  Often when I make a wreath base cover I am so keen to get it stretched out in place and see how it looks that I forgot to take a photo but I remembered to snap a quick shot last night. By fire and lamp light so its not brilliant but it does give an idea of how I put these things together.

Thats 73 stripes of single crochet (you can see where I realised it had got a bit narrow and increased the width a bit, wreath base covers are far from an exact science).  73 stripes is 146 rows and more distressingly 146 ends to deal with!

But I valiantly tackled the ends and to ensure that the colours didn’t skew or twist and to help the back to be as lovely as the front I used the tail end to sew up the corresponding stripe as seen in this photo.  Oh so very fiddly but absolutely worth it.

Which leaves only one thing left to show you.  The finished wreath.  Ready?  Ta-da!

Turns out there was one last thing left to say, Lucy likes it!! I posted a photo on her Facebook page and she said that she loves it.