Right now, I'm finishing up making the Pentagranny Baby Blanket by Shelley Husband.
Unlike triangles, squares, and hexagons, pentagons do not tile evenly. If you make a bunch of pentagons and line them up against each other, there will quickly be significant gaps between motifs. This Shelley Husband design addresses that by filling the gaps with triangles, and the design works really well.
I've enjoyed making this blanket. Her instructions are simple and clear, although she doesn't always tell you to cut the yarn when it's time to cut the yarn. It's just implied, and it's pretty obvious when that's the case. Husband is an Australian and uses British crochet terminology, but all her patterns are also available in American terminology. I downloaded the American version of this pattern, and I've had no problems with it.
This is what happens when you tile pentagons. You can see the gaps between the outer pentagons, which are filled in the next pic.
I've also learned a few things over the course of making this pattern. In order to create a seamless appearance when joining at the end of a round, Husband does not slip stitch into the beginning of the round. Instead she works fewer corner chains and then works a single or double crochet into the beginning of the round, placing the working loop in the middle of that corner. Then you work the first stitches of the next round around that single or double crochet. It's a clever technique, and I will definitely use it in the future.
This pattern also introduced me to the half treble crochet. Initially, I assumed the term was a lapse in translation, and she meant half double, but that didn't make sense in context. The pattern actually includes a link to a video tutorial for half treble.
For a half treble, yarn over twice, draw up a loop, yarn over and draw through 2 loops, then yarn over and draw through the remaining 3 loops on the hook.
The result is taller than a double crochet, but shorter than a treble, and I'm glad to have added it to my repertoire.
Of course, being me, I haven't been following the pattern precisely. While the pattern has you using six different colors, I'm only using one. The yarn I'm using is a sport weight that I bought on clearance at Hobby Lobby, and so the gauge is a bit off from where it's supposed to be, meaning that my motifs are smaller than intended. Since I'm only using one color, I did a lot of the joining as I went, and that means I joined things in a different order than instructed. I'm not entirely sure why, but by joining the outer large pentagons as I made the triangle motifs instead of joining them to the central large pentagon and then making the triangles, the space for the central large pentagon wound up significantly larger than the central pentagon. I dealt with that by adding a few rounds of the pattern stitch used for the border to the central pentagon before attaching it to the outer pentagons. If I had attached the outer pentagons to the central one and then added the triangles, that would have worked just fine, since the stitch numbers all lined up. I'm also making up for the smaller gauge by adding extra rounds to the border at the end.
You can see the extra rounds I added to the central pentagon in this pic.
Overall, I love this pattern. It's clever and clearly written, and the finished blanket lays flat. I'm looking forward to trying some of Shelley Husband's other patterns in the future.
This post has been linked to Busy Monday, Inspire Me Monday, Senior Salon, The Stitchin' Mommy, and Thursday Favorite Things.
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