Last week about this time, I shared some thought for a future blanket that would use up a lot of my Stylecraft Special DK stash.

However later when I went back to look at the larger balls of yarn which were left, they seemed a bit sad and I couldn’t see what I might use them for.

I hadn’t been too happy using the other smaller but still quite substantial balls in with the 5-20g balls and so I put them back in the box and had another look.This was much better!

They looked as if they might make quite a nice rainbow style blanket and I started wondering if that was what I should save them for. I then weighed them all, though I made a couple of mistakes with the colour names.

Now I wasn’t feeling too good, so as a quiet sit down project, I started thinking of what sort of rainbow blanket might work as something different.

In my normal way I started with numbers and patterns.

There are some people who think that mathematics is inimical to creating beautiful objects but that is not true.

Paul Dirac, an English mathematical and theoretical physicist, said: “God used beautiful mathematics in creating the world.”

There are many patterns underlying those things we find beautiful and I find thinking in patterns before I add in the colours helps me achieve my goals.

Having found some numbers that pleased me,  I then roughed up very quickly an idea of how such a blanket might look, using colours that contrasted well on screen.

I modified it slightly when I had calculated how much of each colour might be needed (on the right).I had decided that a useful size of square blanket would be about 5ft square.

Then I looked more closely at the colours and realised that not only would I have to buy more yarn for the knot part but to get a good balance of colours I would also have to buy some more of those.I could see wanting to buy the four colours that stick out to the right and might run out of the three that point out to the left, though I did find a couple of small balls of two of them that might help.

I don’t really need another blanket but if I made this I would want to keep it and it would be a great deal of work both in creating the squares and in deciding on the arrangement. So I don’t know what to do really.

Luckily I do have some other things to work on for now and blanket making is really something for Autumn and Winter anyway.

One thing I would be really interested in that came up when I was planning was what size a four round granny in DK yarn with a 4mm hook comes out at for most people. I’ve been trying to find out a standard size but I’m not even sure that there is one.