The Mota Blanket!

I’m excited to share about the Mota Double Weave Blanket I designed in collaboration with Wooldreamers Yarn!

I’m also excited to share a bit about my design process. I knew the blanket would be striped because who doesn't love playing with color? I knew I would also be using Mota from Wooldreamers, which has many gorgeous colors. So I started by grabbing some paper and colored pencils and playing with different colors and striping patterns.

Playing around with asymmetrical vertical and horizontal striping with an off-white main color.

Using thick and thin colored striped divided by an off-white main color.

Laying out the idea of color blocks divided by thin dark vertical and horizontal stripes.

Now adding color to the process. I want to explore this more. I love the boldness of a bright green here.

Wooldreamers liked the upper left design layout the best. However, we still needed to finalize the colors. We started grabbing several colors to decide on the final palette for the sample.

This was the color palette we decided on for the stripes. Not shown is the off-white main color.

Then it was time to get down to the details, both how the striping sequence would flow and how wide the stripes of each color would be based on the sett. Next, I started drawing out my layout to scale using graph paper. Each square represented 2.5-inch stripes.

After crunching the number of yarn ends needed for each vertical and horizontal stripe, I realized my initial striping sequences wouldn’t work. If I had incorporated all of the horizontal striping sequences, I wouldn’t have had the negative space I wanted for the upper center part of the blanket.

As I began my new layout to-scale layout, I soon got frustrated because I wanted to play around with the distance between the stripe sequences, the size and shape of the main color block, and the color order of the stripes.

So I decided to make different striping sequence pieces and play around with the layout on the graph paper. So it’s kind of like a puzzle.

This allowed me to explore the distance between the striping sequence.

The layout on the left is flipped and has different color combinations than on the right.

Do I want to flip the colors around? Do I like the larger repeat on the bottom.

Exploring different layouts of the striping blocks. Do I like the large stripping block on the bottom better?

The possibilities are endless. I could keep this layout and flip colors around.

You could use this process to design a striped crocheted or knit shawl or scarf. Grab some paper and colored markers or colored pencils of choice and play around with your color layout. Do you want strips or color blocks? Or color blocks with thin stripes to break things up?

Once you have your chosen layout, use graph paper to make one that’s a little closer to scale. Then, make things a little easier on yourself, make color cut-outs to move them around, and play with how the colors will work. Hint - Wooldreamers Mota yarn has over 40 colors you might want to look at, so you can design your own striped accessory, blanket, or garment!

If you want to weave this design, head to Wooldreamers and contact them!

What do you think? Would this work for you? How would you use this? Drop a comment below!