4th January 2014: Woohoo, made a start. I want this for a 3’ wide bed, with a bit of overhang. Using the chainless foundation, I did a starting row of 212 sc, which comes to about 4’ wide. Once I’ve finished the stripes, adding a border will add about 3” each side, thus making it about 5’ wide. That should be enough!

10th January 2014: Instead of trying to get the right number of stitches per pattern at the very start and very end of each row, I’m doing 3 sc, hdc, or dc (depending on the stitch pattern) at the start and end of each row, to give it a kind of straight border. In this way I hope the edges will remain pretty level.

17th January 2014: As there is such a huge mixture of stitches, it’s important to keep on eye on gauge. For example, I did a few rows of sc and hdc, which are “narrower” than some of the more patterned rows, and which have pulled the sides in a little. The solution would be do them more loosely, or on a bigger hook.

19th January 2014: Also, the Catherine Wheel stitch also pulls the work in. This time it was making the edges curl up into a curve, which I could not ignore, and so I frogged back the Catherine Wheel rows, and redid them using a 5mm hook. That seems to have done the trick.

1st March 2014: I wasn’t very happy on the bobble row for two reasons, first the bobble didn’t stand out enough, and secondly I could see the bobble colour showing through between bobbles. So I did a bit of research, and discovered that if I did the stitches between the bobbles in sc, and the bobble in dc, the bobbles were more defined. The bonus then was that, on the next row, I could catch the bobble colour yarn strand and incorporate it within the stitch so it doesn’t show through.

24th March 2014: Just started the border. My first row is a 3DC cluster, then skip 2, then 3DC cluster again etc, a bit like setting up a granny row. Where I have unevennes down the side, for example by the Catherine Wheel row, which pulled in a little bit, I did 3TC, and where there was a bulge out because the pattern on that stripe was a bit wider, I did 3HDC or 3SC. It seems to have levelled the wobbly side edges up really well.

29.03.14: Done! For the border I did a couple of rows of grannies, and then finished up with Lucy’s picot border. It’s a simple picot, just slip stitch into the back loop of the next 3 stitches, and in the 4th stitch work (sc, ch2, sc) again into the back loop. Finished just in time to give to my mum tomorrow!