Goal Setting for a new design

Inspiration for designs come from all places. Sometimes the editor, Brett Bara, of Crochet Today, asked me to make a throw using these yarns. So she gave me my inspiration on this one! But there were many yarns and I had to figure out what to do with them....quick!

I started with pen and paper to help crystallize some ideas.

Goals- Fields of color (for eye to rest)

Unifying element (center always Spellbound?)

Variation- not always one round, one color. Up to 4-6 different combinations

DONT be like Babette blanket from IC

Visual balance, pink is weighty, Majesty carries weight.

little texture to compensate for strong color weight

choose 1 hook to accommodate all yarns -J?

Don't run out of yarn.

Use digital photos for composition

Not all lacy, not 100% all dense

Here is some further explanation of my notes:

Spellbound is one of the yarns.

The yarn colors reminded me of the Babette blanket. Babette is a gorgeous blanket and I wanted to be careful not to mimic it. It was in Interweave Crochet in 2006 (I think).

I also thought that Spellbound would be good for the centers, because it is a slippery ribbon yarn, so a tighter weave/stitch would help it keep its shape and help the ends stay woven in when finished.

Pink is weighty- what I mean is that it is a dominant color and I knew that it would draw your attention wherever it would be placed. So I wanted to place it strategically so that it didn't overpower the other colors. It carries more visual weight than the other colors. (It gets your attention more).

Majesty carries weight- The Spellbound ribbon color is Majesty. I knew it would also get attention because of it's shiny look and varigated color (compared to the other solid yarns).

Little texture to compensate for strong color weight. I thought that if it was too textured, with all those colors, it would just be too much going on and it could look "messy" easily. One way to avoid this was to not use too much texture (avoid bobbles, avoid clusters, avoid cables, not too many post stitches).

Choose 1 hook. Because I was going to move the yarns around and not put them in the same place in the motif, I thought it would be easier to put bigger yarns into little yarn stitches if I use all the same hook. The Spellbound I think is a Bulky yarn, the Soft Yarn is much smaller. The yarns were not all the same size.

Don't run out of yarn! The yarn was supplied to me, and I didn't want to ask for more and risk getting a new dye lot. As it was, I had plenty of yarn. But in the design, I knew that I couldn't make it 90% one yarn and 10% everything else or I'd run out of the dominant yarn.

Use digital photos for composition practice- I'll talk more about this on another day.

Not all lacy, not 100% all dense. I knew with all those colors that there would be many ends to weave in. It's easier to weave in ends on a denser stitch pattern than a lacy one. Or I could alternate rows of dense and lacy to give the ends somewhere to go. Also, again the Spellbound is slippery and harder to weave in, so I didn't want to make my life more difficult.

After thinking about all this, I started swatching. I probably swatched 3 concepts? A row plan, a ripple plan, a motif plan. The squares appealed to me the most (are you surprised?). I showed all three concepts to Brett along with my recommendation that we choose the squares. She agreed and I was on my way! It probably took about 2 or 2.5 weeks to make, plus an additional 3-5 days of goal setting and swatching.