Quick Catch Up with Janie Crow

Life away from crochet has meant that I am once again a little late with this quick Catch Up email, which, for various reasons, is also much shorter than usual.

I hope you have a couple of minutes to read this short, hopefully sweet and definitely speedy catch up and I hope that things will return to normal by the time I am back in your inbox in a couple of weeks time!

The Royal Garden pattern was first released in 2018 and is one of four designs inspired by my trips to the Green Hotel, Mysore. There are lots of areas within the hotel and its surrounding grounds to sit and relax, but one of my favourite places is the coffee shop, situated towards the back of the building within a lovely atrium, that features a terracotta tiled floor and a central open garden of vines and shrubs.

I have been working on two new versions of the blanket design over the last few months. One of them has been made using Stylecraft Special DK and the second one has been made using their 100% recycled yarn ReCreate DK.  

The design is based on two aspects of the hotel gardens; the floor tiles found within the atrium coffee shop and the formal, quilt like layout of the main garden, which sits to the front of the hotel. The main garden provides another lovely place to relax, and it features walled flowerbeds full of lovely gold, orange and pink marigolds, fresh green lawns and smartly pruned bushes. In the evening, the garden takes on a magical quality when thousands of fairy lights twinkle in the foliage.

The pattern for this project was originally written for yarns from the Rowan and Scheepjes Yarn ranges, but many of these have now been discontinued, so the new yarn listing brings the design bang up to date and gives you the choice between a smooth DK weight yarn and slightly textural, tweedy one.

I used a traditional patchwork quilt design as the inspiration for the layout of this project and have added two diagrams to the pattern that show alternative ways of piecing the motifs. If you squint slightly when looking at the layout above I hope you can see interlocking circles. If you do the same when looking at the image below then hopefully you can see the difference between the two. The layouts use the same number of motifs and instructions for joining are included in the pattern.

Emma has made a free Youtube video that shows the Flat Braid Join technique used in this pattern, which you can find here and we also have a free technique download for surface crochet, which is used to add some definition to the tile motifs, by following this link.

The image above shows a section of the blanket made using Stylecraft ReCreate DK. You can find kits for this version by following this link.

The image above shows a section of the Stylecraft Special DK blanket. We hope to have kits for this version in stock soon.

If you want to use yarn from your own stash or fancy swapping the shades about a little, instead of purchasing a kit, you purchase the stand alone pattern to guide you. It is available in UK and US terms and we hope to have a Dutch language pattern available soon. The 16 page pattern is available as a paper brochure via our website here, or you can get a download version via Ravelry or Etsy. Patterns are £8.95.

I am really pleased to finally be able to show you my revamped versions of this design and hope you like the look of it. The pattern uses mostly UK treble crochet (US double crochet) so although it is a big blanket that sits flat on top of a king size bed, it does grow pretty quickly.
 
I hope you have some nice plans for your weekend and that you might be able to find some time for a spot of knitting or crochet over the weekend too!