If you follow me on Intagram or Facebook you will have seen me posting pictures of a new mega granny mandala that I finished just before Christmas. Its been looking great all over the holidays, on the big table in the kitchen and on the coffee table in the lounge. I love mandalas and I really like the look of a granny mandala in particular and this one is just perfect for adding a bit of colour wherever I need it.

I’ve had many requests for the pattern, which is now available on Craftsy for $1.50, which makes it about £1.00 in British pounds. It varies though with the exchange rate! Today when I just looked its £1.03. The good thing about Craftsy though, is its outside the EU so if you are in the EU you don’t get stung with the VAT charge that now applies on Ravelry because of the new and complicated EU law on digital downloads.

Visit Craftsy to buy the patternUpdate on January 10 – the pattern is also now available on Ravelry.

Buy the mega granny mandala pattern on Ravelry

This particular mega granny mandala is made from Stylecraft Special DK in shades of red, green, gold and silver, so its is quite Christmassy… but unlike the decorations it doesn’t have to be packed away and I’m going to carry on using it throughout the rest of the winter.

The colours used are: matador, lipstick, raspberry, gold, silver, green, kelly green, greengage, claret

You may remember seeing it in my kitchen when I was doing my New Year planning…

Visit Craftsy to buy the pattern

Making a mega granny mandala

You might be thinking that a granny mandala is easy so why have a pattern… That’s what I thought when I first attempted to make one and ran into a load of trouble. I thought I could just ‘wing it’ but after just a few rounds I couldn’t get the stitch count right and I ended up with a ruffled effect. This is caused by having too many stitches in the outer rounds.

I still use the first one I made but it needed a lot of blocking and the only way it looks OK is when its sitting on a round table!

It took me quite a while and a lot of maths to work out the formula for keeping the rounds looking like grannies yet having the right number of stitches to allow the crochet to lie flat as it grew. And it does grow – mine is 32 rounds and it measures 66cm (26 inches) in diameter. It only uses 185g of yarn – which is 550 metres or about 600 yards, but obviously you need small amounts of each colour and its a great project for stashbusting.

Unlike making a circular bag base, you don’t increase on each row – otherwise your grannies would all look a bit wonky. But exactly where and how to increase is a bit of a feat of engineering. But it was all worth it in the end and I’m very happy to have now written up the pattern so that you can make this as a lovely relaxing project.

It works up very quickly and you will probably be able to have a mega granny mandala sitting on your table in just a few evenings. It would also make a great Sunday project – the pattern is printable and the pattern details (minus the intro page and photographs is just three pages, so easy to print and tuck into your project bag.

Visit Craftsy to buy the pattern

A little note about greengage

This is the first project that I’ve used one of the little-talked-about new Stylecraft DK yarns that is made from two colours. Greengage is a mixture of darker and lighter green tones and I really like it. It adds a bit of visual texture and it goes really well with the other greens and with the golds and reds.

You can see it in the close up below – you can see it in the rows immediately above and below the little insert picture of the yarn ball. I’ll definitely be using more of this and trying out the other multi-tonal shades too.

If you make the mandala I’d love to see some pictures so please post to my page on Facebook – I’m Crafternoon Treats on there too xxx

Here is the pattern link again 🙂

Visit Craftsy to buy the pattern

This content was originally published here.