Background
The inspiration for this blanket came from the passing of my beloved Great Aunty Peg in March 2018. She was in her 98th year and right up until a couple of months before she died she was still crocheting beautiful dish cloths and delicate lace cotton borders for guest towels and hand towels. Every year for my birthday and Christmas I would receive a little pile of beautifully crafted towels. I now have a life time supply and I treasure them all.

My job was to make sure she had a steady supply of her favourite 4 ply cotton yarns. It turns out that I wasn’t the only person keeping her supplied because when we started cleaning out her unit we found a huge stash of crochet cotton in all weights and a wide range of colours. I claimed it all (as well as some other yarn goodies, but more on that at a later time) and posted it to myself as it was too much to fit in to my suitcase. It turns out that I mailed myself close to 3 kilos of crochet cotton - this is a lot of cotton!

The photo of me and my Great Aunty Peg is from 2009. My, but we both looked young back then :-).

My goal is to craft a beautiful memorial crochet blanket to honour my Great Aunty and to use up as much of her stash as I could to make it (oh, and maybe also use up any 4 ply cotton stash of my own!). I chose the Windflower Hexagon motif because it was so pretty, it used two colours and because it had a couple of stitch combinations that were new to me.

Progress Report
26 March 2018 - a week after my Great Aunty passed away I made a start on the blanket. I kept aside a couple of skeins of cotton from the Santa Sack of yarn that I mailed home to myself and after a couple of motifs I had mastered and memorised the Windflower Hexagon motif. Now I could go gangbusters.

1 April 2018 - I’ve been going gangbusters and I already have 20 motifs. I can manage to do three motifs in an evening … and watch TV too of course, which probably slows me down a bit :-). I’m mostly using my 3.00 mm hook for the motifs. However, some of the 4 ply cotton is actually knitting cotton and it is a wee bit thicker and fluffier than some of the other yarns. I use the 2.5 mm hook for these yarns. It does make for a thicker motif (not really a problem in my view) but the trade off is that the finished size is a better match for the motifs made with regular 4 ply crochet cotton.

1 May 2018 - still making excellent progress. I’ve now started working motifs during my commute (Mr capitalKNITS is driving) and I try to work 3-4 central elements (i.e. just one colour) each way. In the evening after dinner I work the second colour on each motif and then sew in my ends. i’m trying to be very diligent with my ends because a project like this has gazillions of them, and I know I can procrastinate about ends if I don’t deal with them straight away. I’ve also started chipping in to some of the finer yarns in the stash. Some of the yarn is 3 ply and I’m pairing it with ultra fine crochet cotton to give a weight approaching 4 ply, but also to produce lovely marled colour combos. They look great.

21 May 2018 - OK, I promised myself I wouldn’t do this until I had worked all the single motifs, but I couldn’t help myself. I’ve started joining the motifs together into 7 unit “flowers” so that I can start to see how all my colours are working together. I hasten to add that I have no particular plan around colours other than to have lots of them! The advantage of the 7-unit flower approach is that I can lay out my flowers and rotate them so that I don’t get similar coloured units sitting next to each other. I’m hoping this will make my job easier when it is time to join everything together.

Current count:
Finished flowers = 11 (77 units)
Single units = 79
Grand total so far = 156 units

11 June 2018 - I’ve been busy joining together my 7-unit flowers and now I have 30, the total number that I will use for the blanket. I’m doing 5 flower units per row, with a total of 6 rows. Not including whatever edging I put on the blanket, this will give a good size as a throw rug on a Queen size bed. My yarn stocks are rapidly depleting, to the point where a week ago all I seemed to have was bits and bobs and a lot of cream! I caved in and bought two balls of 4-ply Panda cotton in a lovely shade of bubblegum pink and a nice teal. I’ve also been raiding my sewing basket for dressmaking thread and using multiple strands to bulk out the rather large amount of 3-ply cream cotton still remaining. This has allowed me to introduce a wider range of marle effects, which I’m really liking. I have calculated that I will need 72 single units to use for joining together the flowers between rows and also to fill in the top and bottom edge gaps, plus ends of rows and corners. Phew, still quite a way to go.

Current Count:
Finished Flowers = 30 (201 units)
Single Units = 27

Grand total so far = 228 units

25 June 2018 - Two weeks ago I bit the bullet and started joining my units into strips, even though I hadn’t finished all the single units that I would need for joining and neatening corners. My plan was to do three strips each having two rows of five 7-unit flowers, plus joining units. Well, I sort of did this but I used a different joining strategy for each of the three strips. All was looking just fine until I lined up my three 5x2 strips, only to discover that I obviously can’t count, because one of the strips was longer than the other two! I have no idea how I did this so now I am quickly finishing a couple more single units so that I can get everything the same length. Last night I got super impatient and joined together the two strips that were the same length. And wow! It looks fantastic. By the weekend I should have a single blanket with all bits and pieces joined in to make a lovely whole. Now I just need to decide how to finish the edges. The bottom and top edges are a simple saw tooth zig zag and I will leave them like this when I add the border (still not sure what the border will look like). I’m less happy about the side edges, which have a cogged appearance, which looks a little chunky to my eyes. I’m going to experiment with a partial unit to fill the gaps and give a me a straight edge. This will also allow me to use up all the leftover yarn that wasn’t quite enough to do a full windflower hexagon. Watch this space!

1 July 2018 - Well I’m pleased to say that I now have a single blanket with all the full windflower hexagon units joined together. The current dimensions of the blanket are 18 rows x 16 units per row - a spectacular 288 units in total. And I’ve been experimenting with a half unit motif to fill in my cog tooth edges and I think I’ve nailed it. I need 18 1/2 units (9 each side) and I’ve already completed 13 units, all of them using the itty bitty leftovers from the blanket. This has been a great way to use up those funny little pieces of yarn and has allowed me to keep a really bright colour scheme along the edges. If I hadn’t kept those leftovers, the side units would have been very dull indeed as I only have 4 colours left from the rest of the blanket.

5 July 2018 - It’s finished! I had a four-day marathon after my last update where I crocheted like a demon, finishing and adding all my half units by the following evening. I spent the remaining days doing a very simple two-colour edging for the blanket, simple in part because I didn’t want the edging to detract attention from the blanket as a whole, but also because my options for suitable cotton yarn were fairly limited. After I had finished the edges, I lightly steam pressed the whole blanket to smooth out any lumps and bumps and to settle the edging.

Some final metrics for the finished Memorial Blanket:

It weighs in at a hefty 1.9 kg. Quite a weight while it was sitting on my lap as I worked the edging, but I think this will be fine when sleeping under it.
The finished measurements are 190 cm x 52 cm.

This has been a marathon crocheting effort by me and for every unit that I worked, I held my Great Aunty Peg in my mind. I feel a bit sad now to finish the blanket, but guess what? Whilst I have almost no 4 ply cotton yarn left, there is still some 2 and 3 ply yarn and I’ll be trying to use it up somehow. Oh, and did I mention all the 4 ply sock yarn that was also part of the inherited stash? That will be a whole other story.