TV crochet...

I'm not going to make any excuses for purchasing a whole series of The Waltons. Some might think it's seriously uncool but my excuse is that I missed out first time round, in the late seventies, because they didn't have subtitles back then. I watched bits but I couldn't follow it and it was one of those programmes that my long suffering little bro didn't really want to fill me in on, and who could blame him? Yes I could have bribed him, tied him to a chair, beat him up, but for reasons unknown I let him off the hook on that occasion.

Anyway, I really love all that make do and mend stuff and there was plenty of that in the depression years on Waltons Mountain! I love the fact that extended family live under the same roof and boy, there's so much job sharing going on, it's enough to make me start drawing up a rota for round here!

The grandmother is to be seen with the occasional piece of crochet in her hands (when she's not repairing denim dungarees that is!), the girls make the occasional crochet or knitted scarf and there is one particular crochet blanket that I keep spotting. I liked the way there was no need for an additional border because the treble clusters make a scalloped edge as it is. With a bit of help from my lovely blog friend we (she) solved the mystery of the pattern required to get that edge and hey presto one little sample of the Walton's crochet blanket! The vertical stripe is achieved by surface embroidery which is a little bit tricky since it works upwards into trebles so it doesn't really have a very uniform or obvious stitch on which to space even stitches, but even so, it's not impossible. It's a nice way to gain an extra colour and dimension to a simple shell stitch pattern.

I had better not start another blanket right now but I think a cushion would be fun to make with this pattern. I'll add the basic instructions to this post when I've relocated them from my emails. Done in rows of two they look like four petal flowers so this would probably look quite good in a bright colour combination.