Planning and Inspirations - part 1

For my first blanket I started with very little prior planning - I knew what yarn I wanted to use, and I had a basic stitch pattern that I loved and I threw myself straight into it. And generally, apart from a couple of frogging events, its going pretty well; I like the random way the colours work and it's fun stopping every now and then to plan the next few rows... really I just love plonking down random colours next to my most recent row and trying ever weirder choices.

And, while I've got a few very nice blanket patterns in my Ravelry favourites, I wasn't actually intending on starting another blanket until my current one is finished. Then my brother's fiancee made a comment about buying new soft furnishings for their flat, and an idea took hold...

They're both pretty easy to buy presents for individually, but are a moderate pain to buy joint presents for - so I figured I'd make them a nice blanket... even better since she's always cold and wearing multiple jumpers etc. I also figured that since I work slowly, if I start making it now, it should (hopefully) be ready in time for Christmas.

I knew more or less what colour scheme I wanted - their living room is mostly neutrals, so I wanted colours to fit that, with a couple of deeper reds or maybe purples for contrast.

My first port of call was Design Seeds. And after spending a quite frankly ridiculous amount of time browsing through things, I picked a few that were close to what I wanted - none of them were exact, but between them, they gave me a good idea of what I wanted and, more importantly, how they would work together.

Clockwise from left these are Winter Hues, Puppy Tones and Bicycle Tones.

Seriously though, Design Seeds should probably come with some sort of warning - just like TV Tropes or Wikipedia's random page feature, it's very easy to loose several hours of your day just browsing through the website... that and you come away with more ideas for colour schemes than you have time to work on!!

My next stop was comparing these colours to those available in the Stylecraft Special DK, giving me the following colour selection:

There's a couple of additions I may make (white and the new gold that was recently released), but overall I'm happy with it as a starting point for a blanket.