It's finished!! The Blooming Big Blanket

Yay!!!  After 14 months (but not continuously), the Blooming Big Blanket is now finished and on the bed!

I've talked about the blanket before, but just as a recap, the seed for the idea was sown at Yarndale 2016, when Lucy, of Attic24, let me use her blanket planning pegs to come up with the colour palette to match our Laura Ashley wallpaper and fabric.

We selected Grape, Pale Rose, Grey and Silver from the Stylecraft Special DK range.  My lovely son ordered me a huge bagful of these colours for my birthday, from the fabulous online shop, Wool Warehouse.

Our bed is 5 feet wide, and I wanted a good foot overhang on each side, so the blanket is just over 7 feet, or 420 stitches wide!  

I used Lucy's Neat Ripple Pattern, and decided on a 12 row stripe of Grape, 6 rows of Pale Rose, 2 rows of Grey and 1 row of Silver.

Throughout last winter I ripped and rippled, and rippled some more.  I then needed to take a break from it, so made a couple of cardigans for myself, and a few other things.  I also found, as the weather got warmer, it was not as easy to work on, as by this point it was soooo warm and heavy!  As the weather cooled down I found a second wind and really went for it!  

I then had to decide on the edging, and chose to do Lucy's edging from her interlocking ripple blanket. I loved doing this edging, as it seemed to tie all the ripples together and I felt the end was in touching distance.

The last thread was finally snipped and it was hauled upstairs and draped lovingly over the bed.  It's been very difficult to photograph, as it's so huge, and the light levels have been so low, but today it was cold and sunny so I tried my best to get some decent pictures.  

During the day we keep it folded up at the end of the bed, mainly so the cat doesn't lie on it and snag it with her claws:

But at night we pull it up the bed and snuggle down for a Blissful Night's Sleep under its yarny loveliness...

I am so very pleased with it, and it was worth every stitch.  Speaking of every stitch, I worked out a few statistics!

• Excluding the edging, there are 180 rows, giving a total number of ripple stitches of 75,600!

• It used approximately 30 balls of Special DK, which equates to roughly 6 miles of yarn!

Thank you, Lucy, for your patterns, and to everyone at Copper's Creative for your encouragement.  This was certainly the biggest ever project I have undertaken, but I'm so glad I did. :)

Donna x