circles blanket

Huzzah! It's finished, fifteen months and ninety-nine squares after it was begun, although it did take just a wee bit more yarn than I originally expected...

It was actually finished last week, but the light's been so poor that photography has been impossible - so we've had the chance to road-test it over the weekend and its woolly warmth proved just the thing for a dose of flu.

I have absolutely loved working on this blanket... the yarn is mostly wool or wool mix in aran weight... delightfully warm and thick, soft but not too soft. The pattern was dreamt up while finishing off my first dotty blanket a couple of summers ago... this time I wanted something with a more complex design and the opportunity to play around with the juxtaposition of colour. I was after a vintage, homespun feel with a heavy, workaday quality - the sort of rug or blanket that might be seen spilling out of an old Morris Traveller in a feature on autumn picnics in Country Living...

Circles have always fascinated me... I love the work of Sonia Delaunay and Patrick Heron... the simple repetition of shape and colour in different arrangements, creating different emotional reactions. I wanted this blanket to speak of all this, to be both the sort of blanket you might find in a little slate-roofed cottage in the country and yet to have associations with art and design... the sort of blanket that Barbara Hepworth's baby triplets would play on in her Cornish studio...

I know I am probably mad... how can one blanket be invested with all this meaning and significance?! Maybe crochet alters the mind... am I the only one who does this? I can invent a whole world around a cushion cover, a teapot, a jar of flowers... simple domestic items so easily transport me to a place, a time, a way of life...

It's endlessly absorbing producing the growing pile of squares, each one with a different feel, different combinations of the six colours. Only about four have doubles, although I didn't make any special effort to avoid duplication, it just worked out that way. I enjoy the gentle maths of a project like this, ensuring each colour is used enough times, assembling the final pattern with no matching neighbours, and then there is the thrill of seeing how the background colour draws it all together. There are never more than glimpses, visions or imaginings of the whole during the making process - it doesn't become itself until it is sewn together and is a whole soft cloth, heavy and warm.

The portability of crochet squares means that a blanket like this holds many memories... of home and holidays... New York City in the snow and ice... East Sussex in hot, hot sun... the Wye Valley in autumn... underneath the elm tree in the garden... in front of a roaring fire... 40,000 ft up in the air. All hooked in and captured so that it becomes part of life and living.

• If you'd like to make a similar blanket I can do no better than direct you once again to the nimble-fingered Teresa who will show you on YouTube in five minutes what a book would take days to teach.

• My blanket is made in a mixture of pure wool and wool blends, with some cashmere, merino, microfibre and acrylic, and in different weights, but mainly aran, a very little chunky and quite a bit of DK worked using two strands together... all using a 7mm hook.