Ripple C-A-L with Melissa Goodsell

I've decided to join in on a Crochet-A-Long with Melissa Goodsell from Day to Day/ over at One Crafty Mumma. 

This CAL is for a Ripple Pattern Blanket.  As I'm in a blanket making mode and I've never done a ripple, I decided to join.  I'm just about finished with a granny patchwork - can you believe I've never blogged a breath about it?

The ripple begins in just 6 days.  AND... during the CAL time period I'm going to be out of town for five of those days.  My travel time will NOT include crochet, so I'll have to play a little catch up with one of the weeks.

I spent the day envisioning how my ripple would look.  I'm excellent at determining if I like a blanket color-scheme or not but not so good at choosing colors for myself.  I have to SEE the outcome before I dive in.  So today, I first looked into yarn types.  I decided to go with a worsted weight acrylic.  But, I'm kind of picky about acrylic yarn.  It doesn't tend to be my favorite for blankets unless it is a cut above the typical big box store acrylic.  I first looked to Hobby Lobby's "I Love This Yarn," (which I DO love) but they are out of stock of what seems like 2/3 of their big color selection and I just couldn't make it work!

Hobby Lobby skein's of acrylic are BIG - at about 198g and 355yds

Then, I went to the new Brava line by KnitPicks.  I like KnitPicks yarn and their customer service in general and they offer FREE shipping, so I pulled up the color selection for the Brava worsted line.  Unfortunately, they were out of  MOST of their blue hues - bummer.  So, I re-envisioned my blanket just a bit.

Here's a review of Brava worsted - most reviews I read were very good!

Bottom line, I knew I wanted several colors with one single color running through it.  I decided that a rich and creamy camel-like color would be the one to run thru which left me with tons of options for the "several" colors I'd combine it with.  I finally picked out what looked pleasing in my cart but then had the idea to see my selection a bit more graphically and this final step REALLY helped.

I popped into my Storybook Creator 4.0 software (normally used for digital scrapbooking) and created a blanket complete with the album colors from my cart and it looks JUST like I wanted it to! YAY!

A 30 day free trial of this fabulous software is available here!

I knew from the get go that I would use the NEAT RIPPLE pattern by Lucy at Attic24 - I've wanted to ripple along with Lucy for some time and haven't hopped on that bandwagon as of yet.

Now all I have to do is wait for the big brown truck (aka UPS) to wheel its way up to my house and drop off my yarn.  Oh yeah, and do a bit of math to determine the blanket size, ripple pattern more specifically etc etc - not the fun part when it includes math. At least for me.

If you want to join the ripple-along - let Mel know, she's keeping a list and marking updates on progress.