Carla de Bruijn Orangutan
A lot of us complain about crochet projects which require us to join a lot of motifs together. I’m probably the loudest complainer. You’ve read before where I have stated that I dismiss any pattern that begins with wording like “make 37 (or 337) of this motif…” I enjoy making those motifs, usually, and love the look of the projects pictured in a book or magazine, but I am completely thrown off by having to join all those motifs to achieve the finished project.
Not so, Carla de Bruijn! Carla thrives on projects that are composed of hundreds of squares! And, most of the design ideas come directly from her own head or from nature or other things she sees in the world around her.
Each afghan is large – about 80 inches by 80 inches (2m x 2m). Working in this size gives Carla a lot of room to interpret her designs in crochet. It also requires making a lot more squares than a typically sized afghan that is usually smaller than the size Carla makes. Since Carla crochets nothing other than blankets, she has perfected her technique, perfectly adapting the images she sees in nature and from other sources around her into those numerous squares. Each is certainly a labor of love as any realistic price tag would place them far out of the financial reach of most of us – no matter how aware we are of all the labor Carla puts into each piece.
Carla works mostly in cotton, occasionally mixing in some acrylic/cotton blends. She’s been crocheting for 33 years and crochets only blankets/afghans. Most of the times, the recipients of her hard work are friends and loved ones. Like many of us, she finds the cost of materials and the amount of labor would not be returned were she to sell her creations. Carla estimates that she spends about 300 hours crocheting each blanket that costs her about 200 Euros in materials.
To view more of Carla’s work, please visit her website:
Please stay tuned for Part Two to be published soon.
Another inspiration for me!! I don’t feel so bad now that I mostly crochet blankets and afghans … I often get the comment on why don’t I do something else, like a sweater, that you can use. Blankets and afghans are usable too!
I’m half and half on motifs and joining – depending on the mood, I’ll crochet motifs forever, and in the end bag them all to be joined when the ‘joining’ mood hits me! There are times when I just want to join motifs and create the project.
So if you need somebody to join motifs and squares, let me know!