A Rainbow of Magical Snowflakes

Bringing a little sparkle to my winter crochet

One of the things I want to do here is keep a record of the things I make. That was always the ‘bread and butter’ of my posting content and since I stopped, I miss having that to look back upon. I also really miss the photos I used to take of the things I made. There are instagram posts of course, but it’s not the same and who’s to say when an IG account may get inexplicably shut down or hacked or otherwise meet some gloomy fate?

I chat about them on You Tube too, but as much as I try and index my podcasts, which does work quite well, a search for ‘Magical Snowflakes’ turns up a gratifying complete set of results. But watching through clips across several videos to look up something specific isn’t easy, and is far more time consuming than just popping back to read a post.

No, it’s time to resume the practise of recording my makes and so we begin with my latest, my Magical Snowflakes Blanket, the rainbow version. I made the original blanket (and the pattern) in 2023. That version featured a set of icy blue flakes (which you can see in the link above) and as much as I like that one, I also knew immediately that I wanted to make a rainbow edition. I could just see the cascade of colours across the blanket and it’s the reason the blanket is called ‘magical’. A magical multicoloured range of snowflake shades.

I made this blanket in stages. The snowflakes were made around Christmas 2023 and then set aside. Partly due to our house move…

…but also because it seemed like a good ‘winter’ make and so come December time, it was the perfect time to re-visit the project. I figured that I would on work on it through the month and see how far I got, if necessary bringing it out next December and so on. As it turned out though I managed to fit the rest of the blanket making into one month. Almost exactly, as I finished it on the 30th. Very satisfying.

Yarn

I made this blanket using a mish mash of 4ply (fingering) weight yarn for the snowflakes. Some from yarn advents of the past, some old minis I’d collected over time and some left over from other projects. Part of the ongoing ‘reducing my stash’ drive that I’ve been working on since… well about 3 days after I ever started knitting and crocheting I think! The white yarn is Drops Baby Merino, which is a bit of a ‘go to’ of mine for pairing with 4ply yarn. It’s actually described as a sport weight and although it is a little heavier than a lot of 4ply yarns, I find it still works very well with them and is a bit more affordable than the beautiful hand dyed yarns I often work with.

Using a lot of minis in both this blanket and the last (blue) one, has got me thinking that this does actually make a great project for advent minis. You can get a minimum of 4 snowflakes out of a 20g mini and in most cases a half snowflake too. I’ve even managed 5 out of some of them. Even at 4 motifs per skein though, with 24 days of 20g minis that would give you 96 whole motifs, enough to make a blanket bigger than I’ve managed here.

Colour story

As always with my projects I ummed and ahhed over the colours and the layout. I picked out quite a few promising looking yarns as a starting point. I had some variegated minis I wanted to use with pinks, purples, blues and greens, so the basis of a kind of rainbow was there at the start, but it became clear I’d need to add a few more to the mix. So I raided the stash reserves to see what I could rustle up in colours that would work and started making up motifs. That got me most of the way there, but I was still shy of a a dozen or so motifs for the size I wanted, so back to stash again. I wanted a slightly bolder pink at the ‘top’ of my rainbow and could only find a very strong and bright ‘barbie’ pink yarn. I also needed to add another shade to fill out the ‘bottom’ of the rainbow and after much agonising decided I could tip over into yellow. I didn’t have much that I felt worked but choose the closest fit I could live with, (including an almost fluorescent yellowy-green that I really wasn’t sure of) and made those up into flakes too.

Making the grade

The layout was relatively simple. I knew I wanted to accentuate the rainbow, so I was aiming for a gradient. I didn’t want just a row of each colour, I wanted something less rigid and slightly more graduated than that. Besides, I didn’t have enough motifs in each of the shades for that, so another plan was needed. I quite quickly settled on the angled approach and I’m really happy with how that worked out. It made it easier to move from one colour to the next and still muddle a few up to make sure it wasn’t too formulaic. It also eased some of my colour qualms once I saw them all in place.

Once that was done, it was just a case photographing the evidence and getting started on the edges and joining. This is a join as you go blanket, so I worked through each colour in turn, joining each motif in place according to my layout photos and it all just fell nicely into place. I could normally manage to join one colour (4/5 motifs) in each sitting and so it made for nice smooth progress.

Seeing it steadily, seeing it whole

Now that it’s complete I blooming love it! The white edges around each snowflake just brings the whole thing together and I think works to calm those bright and bold pinks and yellows I was worried about and together with a few more punchy purples and zingy greens I’ve got mixed in there I think overall the balance of it isn’t too bad at all.

Which I am taking as a gentle reminder to self to not worry too much about exact shades of colours and agonise too long over placements. I mean, I am who I am, so I’m always going to overthink these decisions to a large extent I’m sure, but it’s another good lesson in letting go a little and trusting the broad idea rather than getting bogged down in the minutiae. You never know, maybe one day I’ll take this lesson on board.

Magical Snowflakes Rainbow Blanket