I saw a blanket on Ravelry a year ago and dropped it into the favorites list. I didn’t pay it too much attention past that; I don’t crochet much; I didn’t need a blanket; it was too big to be portable and most of my time on needles is on the road. But it was eye-catching.
Recently, I came back to my favorites list, after knitting Willow for a girlfriend and spending a lot of time in the projects and patterns search. As I learned to search on Ravelry, I started looking at pattern links, and eventually found my way to Mandala Madness, by Helen Shrimpton at Crystals and Crochet. Mandala Madness was Helen’s first crochet-along (CAL); she has since led several others and the patterns are all fabulous.
I thought about making a blanket; a friend has a request in. However, the problems are insurmountable: It’s warm in the summer in NC, and I cannot haul a 6′ diameter yarn blanket with me all summer. My friend will get a blanket knitted in modular squares.
I joined the Facebook group for the project and saw mandala after mandala in colorway after colorway. Some are amazing, and others leave me less moved. Some people made the pattern in single-color crochet thread and the texture and patterning are striking. There is a big part of my artist brain that does not want to follow someone else’s pattern, and this part also struggles with some of the colorways. When I looked at the album of color inspirations, I realized where the color stress came from*:
- Jinny Beyer’s Color Confidence for Quilters: black makes everything pop. (Ansel Adams’ 1-10 Zone system for dynamic photographic prints is related to this.)
- Freddy Moran (quilter): 10 colors don’t work; 100 do. (Also, red is a neutral.)
Those two color mantras guided the latter part of my rug work, and they explained to me why I gravitated to some mandala blankets more than others. The “100 colors” and the crochet thread examples sent me to an answer that will work for me: embroidery thread. I have three boxes of thread collected from yard sales and thrift shops; I used some in flowers for my wedding but that only scratched the surface. I have plenty, including 20 skeins of red that I found at Walmart for $0.02 each. (Yes, that was a receipt you don’t see very often!)
These were the first two stashes I found:
I had to dig around in the pile of leftover wedding flower supplies on my sewing room table to find the reds. I had pulled them out to make flowers.
In the process, I found some colored crochet thread, and I know I have some metallic than I might add in along the way.
After photographing the layout, I played with filters on my camera and hit black-and-white. Pow!
Working with value (darkness and lightness) in addition to color is why some art jumps off the wall and some doesn’t. Value is different from color; some reds read as very dark when you take the color out and look only at lightness. I’ll need to work on sorting the colors by value more; using red lenses can take the color out and let you see value by itself and it’s quicker than photographing a layout and converting the picture to black and white.
People on the Facebook group suggest about 200-300 skeins to do an entire mandala, so I’ll probably separate the floss into three strands to get more length. I also have a huge collection of floss that was cut to working length and I’ll test using that, but it might be too finicky.
*The “someone else’s pattern” stress simply has to take a back seat for now; I will learn what I need to learn by making this project. If I decide to design something else in the future, I’ll know more.
Stay tuned.
