Putting the British Breeds Project together

I have finally finished the British Breeds Project that I have been working on for the best part of 2 years.  I created the knitted charts back in December 2020 using an old Cross Stitch Design programme that I had and that thankfully still worked on updated operating systems.  Each breed had it's own stitch chart that I printed out onto A4 paper and worked from when knitting and using the programme I was also able to move and rotate each individual breed design into a format that would show how it would all fit together.  It took quite a bit of time to get this right as I wanted the coloured fleece evenly distributed and balanced throughout the overall design as best as I could and in one or two cases I had to re-work the breeds name to fit the available space within the overall design, because some of the names are quite long so can fit on one, two or three lines.  This might sound confusing, but when you look at the design layout below it should become clearer.  I also wanted the names radiating outwards from a central descriptive panel, which is why some of them are upside down, and I also left a bit of room between each piece for the joining together, which I knew I would be doing by some kind of crochet method.

So, I spent from December 2020 to around about November 2021 locating pre-prepared fibres for spinning and fleece for preparing and spinning and spinning it all up and knitting the pieces.  As the number of knitted pieces built up I started pinning them together as per the overall design shown above.  By 8th November 2021 I had reached the point where I was just missing the fleece of one particular breed and everything else was knitted up and pinned to each other but I was already aware that there may be a problem with the actual layout of the pieces as a couple of them had knitted up so much bigger and others knitted up a bit smaller.  I decided that there was no point doing anything with regard to re-designing the layout until I had the final breed, which I finally got in June 2022.  

This was how it was looking pinned together as per the first design with a few pieces still missing

I spent most of July participating in the Tour de Fleece 2022 and then I had a weeks holiday.  Once back from holiday I knitted up the piece and spent the next couple of weeks washing and blocking all of the individual pieces and measuring the actual physical size of each one and then re-drawing each one on the Cross Stitch programme but all the wording got messed up doing this so I decided that I no longer needed the stitched text in each box and so just use typed text to identify what each piece is.  Typed text cannot be rotated, which is why it is all facing one way in the design below, despite the fact that it is also broken up and it is clear the some of the boxes will be sideways on in real life.  This new design, whilst not true to size, does at least show the true size correlation between each of the pieces.  I also left larger gaps for the crochet joins, with each row/column of squares on the graph representing one row of crochet.

My crochet joins were started by working 5ch, 1sc, 5ch, 1sc all the way around each piece with the 1sc being spaced at 2cm intervals and however many rows were needed, keeping in mind that there is at least one row needs around each knitted piece and the row that joins the two together, so if there is 5 graph squares between knitted pieces that is two rows around each piece and one row of loops to crochet the pieces together.  I started with the centre square, the description, and worked outwards from there, creating strips with small joins between each piece where needs be that fitted edge to edge, keeping it square/rectangular at every addition thus: Ryeland, North Country Cheviot, Description, South Country Cheviot were joined together to make a strip.  Devon and Cornwall Longwool was added onto the side of that, which kept it square.  Welsh Hill Speckled Face was added across the bottom of those, then Devon Closewool and Beulah Speckled Face were joined to each other and then that strip added to the rest and so on.  If you look at the design you can see how it would build up bit by bit and by doing the small joins between short edges first and then joining the long strips in one piece it makes for neater joins

Close up of one of the joins

Starting to build up, the centre isn't in the centre right now but its all remaining square

I don't have anywhere large enough to get a full shot of it but it fits a King Size bed and hangs slightly over the side nicely

After laying it out on the bed once it was all joined together I realised that it needed a couple of rounds of crochet around the entire outer edge and maybe some kind of finishing edging to it, so I done the two rounds of chain and single crochet, increasing to from 5 to 7 chains on the 4 corners and then looked for an edging.  I found one and tried it out but whilst it went well with it it didn't quite fit, it had too many stitches and wouldn't lie flat so I adapted it and removed some of the stitches.

All my crochet instructions are the English terminology so my edging was: 2 treble into the chain space, 3ch, single crochet into the back of the first chain to make a picot, 2 treble into the same chain space, single crochet into the single crochet between chain spaces. Repeat in each chain space until the corner: 4 treble, 3ch, single crochet into the back of the first chain to make a picot, 4 treble into the same 7ch space, single crochet into the single crochet and then revert back to the regular 2 treble, picot, 2 treble pattern down the next edge.

It's all done and for the time being has been put into storage until the time that I can show it off somewhere at some distant time in the future.