Coming up to February, hearts are everywhere. I get it, love is in the air and all that but what if you don’t want to get all schmaltzy and saccharine about it?! This is my answer: crochet a broken one! I’ve come up with a corner to corner graphgan design that’s cute but not pukey, how great is that?! To make your own crochet heart, read on…
I chose neon pink (almost impossible to photograph by the way) and a light grey aran yarn. I was all set to go for a blue background colour until I found out I didn’t have enough. This pattern needs two balls of the grey and one of neon pink, with just a scrap of blue for the shiney reflection.
I recently learned about a website called Stitch Fiddle. It’s brilliant! You can make you own designs for knitting, cross stitch and crochet. It’s free to do the basic stuff but I’m tempted to sign up for the fancier version. You get fifteen freebies; after that you have to pay. I haven’t used it to do crochet diagrams yet but I’m probably headed that way. Anyway, I’m not here to sell their stuff. I shall move on…
Above is the graphgan to use. I think it can be printed off if you save it as a document, then you can mark off the squares as you go. I started in the bottom right corner. I can directly tweet and pin from Stitch Fiddle, so I’ll do that in a minute in case it’s somehow easier or better quality. Go to my contact page for the links to those.
Things you’ll need:
2x balls of background colour, 1x ball for heart, a few metres of a third colour.
4.5mm hook. (If you have a particularly loose tension, try a 4mm).
1x 50cm cushion, 1x 50cm cushion cover.
Sewing needle (not as giant as a darning needle but big enough to squeeze the yarn through, it needs to go through the cushion cover).
Before you begin, the first thing you need to do is separate out about 20 grams of the grey yarn, this will be the ball you use to work between the two heart pieces. The thing about making graphgans is that you need a ball/bobbin for each section of colour. I had three grey and two pink balls being worked at the same time (I wound a separate ball of the pink yarn too, just under half). It’s not as tricky as it sounds, I promise. It’s very hard to explain but very easy to do! As long as you know how to Corner to Corner, this is really simple to achieve.
I learned how to do a C2C from a pattern I got from Ravelry but I’ve found this video by Bella Coco, which I wished I’d seen at the time!
Here is a video about colour changes. It was immensely helpful and got to the point. No faffing, thank goodness.
I kept all my workings on one side (it’s a cushion, they’re not going to show). To avoid lots of these, make sure you keep one ball of pink for one heart half, and the other, for the other. There are a couple of places where the yarn would be carried over too many blocks if you didn’t split the yarn and that might look messy. If you look too closely at the picture above you can see where I broke that rule. Just don’t look.
Pin your finished piece to the front of a cushion cover. Pin the four corners first, then add a couple more pins inbetween. I found my cushion cover from Amazon, it was about £3, which is better than the £4.50 it would have cost to buy two more balls of yarn to do a plain c2c back, and more time efficient. Woohoo for saving time and money!
Stitch it on. The ends can be woven in when it’s finished.
Keep the stitches as close to the edge as possible.
Finished! A giant cushion! I wonder what size a DK version would look like…
Let me know what you think. Do tell me if you make one, I would absolutely love to see. Please feel free to make as many as you like but the pattern/design belongs to me so please do not make to sell or sell the pattern. Thanks.
