The Copenhagen Blanket

Hello again.

Can you have too many blankets? Possibly, but then again every one of the blankets which I’ve spent hours, days, weeks crocheting with love, has become a loyal friend. I’ve happily handed a lot of them over to family and friends over the years, but my own ever growing collection is stacked in my studio, waiting patiently for their time in the limelight. I just love the way that a room gets a real freshen up just by swapping one blanket casually thrown over the sofa, with another in a different colour scheme.

The changing seasons influence this a lot, and at the moment the warm golds and russets of Autumn in Scotland bring two of my favourite blankets to the fore. One is the Autumn Gold blanket of course, which has its own blog post, but today I want to tell you all about the Copenhagen Blanket which actually never leaves the back of my favourite crochet chair.

Three years ago we had a wonderful November holiday in Copenhagen. The Tivoli gardens were still decked in their Hallowe’en costumes, with pumpkins in the trees and spooky spider webs over the bushes. The weather was cold and dry, slightly overcast but the grey skies just accentuated the warm yellows and terra cotta colours of the tall narrow buildings. I absolutely loved the city and we walked many miles each day, taking in the beauty of the old harbour houses and the fairytale spires.

Of course with these colours dancing in my head, it was only natural that once home, they would spill out in my next crochet project. I wanted a smallish throw for my green chair, something where the colours blended well, without having a strong geometric pattern like granny squares for example. Something with a tweedy look…..

Instagram provided the answer with a random post by @meetmeatmikes about her Snugglestitch blanket. I loved the way the colours looked woven into each other and blended so well, just the way I wanted.

The next job was to select the colours and, armed with the Copenhagen photos on my phone, I pulled a load of yarns out of my stash. There were golds, terra cottas, greens along with surprising little glimpses of grey blues, navy and even a touch of violet.

So, with a basket of colours at the ready, I picked up my hook. Snugglestitch is a simple stitch once you get the rhythm of it. Each row is a different colour and is always worked right to left (if you are right handed), so there is no turning at the end of the row. But all these colour changes mean only one thing – ends, hundreds of the little blighters, on both sides!

Don’t despair though, in my blanket, the ends were efficiently dealt with, without having to be continually threading a needle. More about that later.

The yarns – I used a combination of Stylecraft Special DK and Stylecraft Batik. You can of course use whatever yarn you like, but I liked the softening effect of the Batik among the solid colours.

Now here comes the tricky bit to explain. If you look at my blanket, you will see that the colour changes produce a variety of stripes, but none of them are the same and none of them repeat themselves. This is because I wanted a RANDOM look. It’s not quite as easy as you would think to achieve a random look. At the beginning of each row, when I chose the next colour to use, I had to ask myself – has that colour appeared next to the previous one already? If it had, I had to choose something else. If the combination of two or three colours together appeared more than once in the blanket, then the brain would see them right away and identify them as a possible pattern.

Of course it would have been infinitely easier to lay all the yarns out in a row in a pleasing colour arrangement, and then proceed to crochet one row of each colour, then go back to the beginning and start again. You would have a simple, if boring striped blanket. No thought needed.

But the beauty of my blanket, or at least I think so, is that you can lay it over your knee and study the myriad different colour combinations making up these subtle stripes and always be fascinated with the way one colour plays off against another. It’s never boring.

OK I accept that you might think that I’m slightly batty, studying the colours in my blanket, but I get SO much pleasure from that, I can’t tell you!

The other plus as far as this stitch is concerned, is that it is double sided – the front and back are identical. This increases the thickness and cosiness, but I have to say it also gobbles up the yarn.

If you haven’t been put off by all this, and I sincerely hope you haven’t, then all it remains for me to do is give you a list of the yarn colours and the sequence I used them. That’s coming up, and there is also a link to the free pattern on Meet Me At Mike’s blog.

Finally, I chose to ignore the forest of ends and made a double border of half trebles in order to neatly encase them. It does involve sewing of course, but that’s only threading the needle once instead of hundreds of times.

I used the same method in the May Blossom blanket and there is a video tutorial for it in my blog post about that blanket, which should be quite useful.

YARN LIST ( You can click on this list, save it to your Photos, and print it from there if you want to.)

The following list is the first sixty rows of my blanket. You can repeat those rows if you like however many times you want, or do as I did, now you have the gist of it and continue to work random coloured rows. My blanket is approx 180 rows and measures approx 48 ins long by 42 ins wide. I reckon chaining around 160 chains for the start would give you that width.

The doubled over borders were worked on all four sides, but I chose to make the top and bottom borders a different colour from the sides – two reasons – I like a bit of quirkiness, and I was able to use up two of the colours I had most left of, in this case Lime and Khaki.

Finally, I left the corners of the blanket empty and then made a circular button in contrasting colours which I stitched in place to fill the corners.

The link for the stitch pattern is HERE on the Meet Me At Mikes Blog, and I have to say a special thank you to Pip for sharing such a lovely stitch tutorial with loads of helpful photos. UPDATE: the above link isn’t working, but you can easily find the tutorial if you google ‘Snuggle Stitch Blanket’

I hope you enjoy making a Snugglestitch blanket, if you want to have a go. If the colours I’ve listed don’t suit you but you still want to have a similar random pattern, just pick your own colours and substitute one of your colours for each of mine.

And finally as ever, HAPPY CROCHETING xx