I love hooking blankets through the chilly months and sometimes find myself snoozing under a snuggly WIP 🙂  Mr B and Miss M also enjoy evaluating the coziness of my projects.

However Miss M does get a little impatient with my progress at times…..

Having completed the Cottage Ripple blanket, the not so successful second ripple blanket and the gorgeous Cosy Stripe at the beginning of 2015, I started looking for ideas for my next blanket.

Requirements:
– a change from ripples and stripes
– random colours
– not granny squares
– a project I could take with me to work on during my daily commute on the train

Pinterest is a great resource for ideas and I came across the African Flower.  I also liked the idea of joining hexagons rather than squares.

There are lots of African Flower patterns out there on the internet but as I haven’t mastered the art of reading a crochet diagram, I needed a tutorial with easy to follow pictures and found Heidi Bears African Flower tutorial.

I played around with the number of rounds and how I would join them together.  I settled on a flower with one joining round.

This project was perfect for my daily commute on the train.  Each morning small balls of yarn in various random colours were popped into a bag with my hook and scissors and I came home every evening with a handful of flowers.

The flowers were joined together in the evenings and at weekends using Heidi Bears join-as-you go method.  I modified this method by joining every stitch rather than joining after each set of three trebles.

Mr B oversaw a lot of the joining together…..

Progress was very quick and it took less than a month to complete the blanket.  The colour combinations were completely random as this depended on the colours popped into my project bag each morning.  I sometimes had to close my eyes to pick the yarn balls to stop myself being drawn to the same colours which would have ruined the whole random colour scheme I wanted to achieve !

Here is the final result….

A close up……

I love how the random colours all came together.  The yarn is Stylecraft Special DK and I used Parchment to join the flowers.

BTW crocheting on the train is a great conversation starter but it usually begins with “What are you knitting………..” !

Happy hooking everyone !