Until recently I had two Facebook pages managing my two side hustles- SmartCookieSam is my baking business and blog and I also had Sammy Jane Stitches which showcased the baby and single bed size crochet blankets I started making during lockdown. It’s so time consuming managing two pages, two Instagram accounts and a separate Twitter account. All this and trying to juggle family life and do my day job as well. To make everything fit together, I’ve added the crochet side of things to SmartCookieSam on all my social media platforms. That’s where the main followers are as I just don’t have the time to set up another page from scratch.

For more background on my crochet, do have a look at my separate page on here: Crochet Blankets To Order.

For this post I am going to share how I joined in the Attic24 Harbour Blanket CrochetAlong (or CAL for short) at the beginning of this year. I love the idea of a CAL and the Harbour one was the second I’d done. In the depths of a dreary grey and miserable winter, the bright and cheerful colours of the Harbour blanket lifted my spirits.

With a CAL, the pattern is usually released in stages or parts so you work on it together with thousands of others throughout the rest of the world. For the Harbour CAL, part one was on the first Friday of the new year! Then, for the following five weeks, five more parts to the main part of the blanket were added to the website for us to follow. February Half Term week up here in North Yorkshire coincided with a “catch up week”. Finally, the border pattern was the last part to be given to us in time to bring us up to the end of February.

I was desperate to start the first part of the CAL the moment it went live. I’d bought the wool pack from Wool Warehouse just before Christmas and it had been sat in my craft room/ office waiting for me to make a start. I couldn’t get started straightaway: I was at work that morning and then went straight from work to go and get my Covid Booster Jab. I did feel a bit tired and achy the next day but this wasn’t enough to stop me doing any crochet!

Throughout the next few weeks and then by the first week in March, I had finished the blanket. It was very heavy by the time I got to the last part of the CAL and I did wonder about leaving a few rows short. But I did think it would definitely make it long enough for a single bed with room for some of it to overhang at the bottom of the bed.

The special Wool Warehouse packs to make the blankets are a convienient way of buying the wool and it does work out a little bit cheaper. Usually there is more than enough wool to complete the kit and often you have leftovers but very occasionally you might run out. I found this to happen with Lapis (the very dark blue shade in the blanket) and ended up buying another ball of it when I was out shopping at my local stockist. I only needed half a row’s worth of wool: how annoying! At least I can use it in another project.

If you would like to find out more about making your very own Harbour blanket, you can still download all the charts from Lucy at Attic24’s website:

https://attic24.typepad.com/weblog/harbour-blanket.html

If you would like to buy the special Harbour blanket pack, then you can buy it from here. The pattern is not included in the pack.

https://www.woolwarehouse.co.uk/attic24/attic24-harbour-blanket-in-stylecraft-special-dk-15-shades

You may wonder what I do with all my blankets once I’ve finished with them. Some I keep and some I sell. This one is actually for sale as I don’t have room for it!

Love Sam xx