To cut or Not to cut crochet. This is the question

After a short delay, here is my progress on a new project with Metropolis mini pack. I thought I would use all 80 colors (or maybe almost all of them), and design a rainbow blanket. In Mosaic crochet. Because mosaic crochet uses two colors at the same time, I needed to arrange colors into two parts. And figure out their order. That was the most difficult part, and unfortunately it didn’t work on the first try. So a small crochet surgery was needed. 

To cut or not to cut crochet. This is the question. 

When I was learning how to design crochet garments, I first studied all different kinds of knitting sweaters and cardigans. I wanted to learn how to shape the yoke in clothes worked from top down. Apparently, both sweaters and cardigans are worked in the same continuous way. And then knitting fabric is CUT on front for a cardigan. 

I was shocked! 

I mean cutting handmade fabric is always scary. There is always a chance that you miss something and fabric will be destroyed. But with my new blanket I had no other chance than an adventurous surgery. 

Well, as I’ve already said, before actual crochet I arranged all mini skeins according to rainbow palette, and then divided them into two parts. This is the “smartest” way I could think of how to use all colors at the same time. 

Metropolis line* has several yellow shades. And my blanket was started with black/brown and those yellows. It looked ok in the very beginning, but as the blanket was growing it became less and less balanced. And at some point I realized I didn’t like a massive yellow part at the bottom. 

I had two ways to fix that: to frog everything and begin from a scratch, or to cut yellow bottom, frog it, replace yellows with something else and then crochet the bottom again, but in the opposite direction. 

Luckily, a while ago I did a small crochet surgery already. And I even blogged about how to restore foundation chain in crochet. I was so happy to come back to this blog post again and to see all useful progress pictures there. 

Before actual destroying my new blanket, I reread instructions a few times, then practiced with a swatch, and only after that decided to try with the blanket. 

 

I chose cream neutral colors to replace yellows, so that the blanket is not unbalanced and less “shouting”. The first row of slip stitches was made with black (the closest shade to a color contrast to yellow in my case). 

And… it worked! Now you can hardly see the seam. How cool is that? 

Try this method now and it might save you one day. 

As for the blanket, I am still working on it and hope to finish by Friday (I’ll show you two versions: colorful and monochrome). 

Stay tuned! 

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