Thursday 30 August 2012

Mayana’s Technicolour Dream-Coat

A little while ago I had a stroke of inspiration and decided I wanted to make Mayana a new crocheted cardigan. Out of granny squares. Without a pattern. I drew up a little sketch on the iPad of what I envisaged, and got to work on the granny squares.IMG_1420

My granny squares were small (only three rounds) and worked up quickly. I loved watching my little piles grow, and experimenting with colour combinations. Mayana would periodically come and examine them and tell me which was her current favourite.

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Finally the time had come to begin piecing them together…

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To begin with I did the back and sleeves as one piece…

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And the front in two pieces with their sleeves. It looked cute. I tried it on Mayana, and realised it was going to be too small. I started to add granny stripe rows to pad it out a bit, but it was all wrong. My original plan was not going to work.

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In true Zoey style (it wouldn’t be a Zoey crochet project it it wasn’t completely pulled apart at least once!) the coat came apart.. back to my simple piles of granny squares. I nutted out the problems I was having, invented a half a granny square pattern (see the purple and green half squares in the picture below) and set back to it.

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This time, I joined the squares using a different method, so there was a raised white border between each square. I think this helped to break it up a bit, and I was much happier with this effect. I also created the sleeves separately to the body this time, using granny stripes instead of making more granny squares. Again, I was happy with the effect this gave, and I think it was nice to have the squares a little more broken up.

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I finished the whole thing off with a bit of a granny stripe border and the cutest edging from a pattern I found on the Attic24 blog. I experimented with the border a bit and figured out how to make a collar too. Oh. My. Gosh. Seriously the cutest thing I have ever created.

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And there she is. My most beautiful princess in her gorgeous technicolour dream-coat. Made and designed by me. She’s chosen pink loveheart buttons that will finish it off. I am so proud of this thing! It’s such a cool thing to go from an imagining to some scratchings on a touch screen and then to a piece of clothing!! I seriously want one of my own!

What do you think?

1 comment:

  1. Zoey, I think this is absolutely beautiful and that you could sell them for mega bucks! I admire your skill in creating your own design and your patience when it didn't work out the first time. Mayans is a very lucky girl!

    ReplyDelete

Thank you!!

 

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