The FIESTA crochet along is a stash busting FIESTA of flowers and colors and the blanket is all worked in the wonderfully fun MOSAIC CROCHET TECHNIQUE! The CAL comes in 6 parts, 1 per week, and there are free video tutorials available for each part on my YouTube channel.

here’s the link to the tutorial for part 1:

The Crochet Along is hosted in my Facebook group, Tinna’s Crochet Club, where you can get all the help and support you need. please join us there for the FIESTA FUN!

Yarn and hooks

You can use any yarn you like; this pattern requires minimum 2 colors. Use a hook that suits your yarn.

There are NO KITS available for this CAL, because I want to encourage you to tap into your own creativity and choose your own colors and yarn - and especially to use some of your stash!

I’m working my FIESTA on a 3 mm hook, with a gorgeous grey main color in fingering weight, it’s 100% Shetland wool from Jamieson & Smith (25 g = 115 m).

I’m doing my usual mixing of stash busting and store-bought yarn usage, and really want to encourage you guys to do so as well! So, I’m using stash and scraps for my flowers and linings/frames. This is a great way to use up your stash, and don’t worry, this approach obviously merits a bit of yarn indulgence still. Since you’re already using your stash, it’s only natural that you buy a few beautiful bright colored skeins for your flowers! Well that’s what I did at least! So, best of both, a bit of yarn shopping but still using up your stash.

For more info on the yarn stats (how much yarn you will need for your FIESTA BLANKET in various sizes) please visit my linked website.

You can also check out my introduction FIESTA CAL video on YouTube for some tips on how to work your colors in this project:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qrkPBjriWr0&t=91s

Size

The size of the octagons will vary depending on the hook and yarn you use. My Fiesta octagons are approx. 21 x 21 cm, and my Fiesta squares are approx. 9 x 9 cm. This is a joined blanket, so you can easily make any size of blanket you want. But just to give you some guidelines, here are 4 sizes:

Baby blanket = 3 x 4 octagons (12)
Medium blanket = 4 x 5 octagons (20)
Big blanket = 5 x 7 octagons (35)
Full Fiesta = 7 x 9 octagons (63)

Abbreviations (US terms):

ST = stitch
CH = chain stitch
SS = slip stitch
SC = single crochet
HDC = half double crochet
DC = double crochet
FPDC = front post double crochet
EXDC = extended DC
TR = treble
DC 2tog / 3tog = work 2 or 3 DCs together
TR 2tog = work 2 trebles together

Introduction

For years, I’ve been fantasizing about someday owning a home where I can lay a mismatching floor of tiles that are just all different kinds. This dream may be inspired, once more, by Cuba, where necessity makes this a common practice.
There, they also tend to just use leftovers of all kinds of tiles, broken ones and what have you, and line them up together to make beautiful mosaic tiling. It’s just glorious!

I have also wanted to do an octagon mixed with squares crochet design for years, so in my FIESTA afghan I have combined those two dreams. The actual tiled floor will have to wait a bit, but in the mean time I have my lovely FIESTA to cozy under … while saving up for that dream house!

So, the idea here is that we have 3 different big octagon flower tiles and 3 different small square tiles, and then you line them up as you see fit, to make your mis matching tiled dream floor … or in this case blanket. Mine has a purposely random look to it, but for you OCD lovelies out there, there’s no prob in lining them up in an orderly fashion! Or even simplifying it and not using all the designs, just picking the ones you like the best!

Last but not least, the flower inspiration for my FIESTA came from the gorgeous Marguerite Motif blanket by the brilliant Sandra Eng, which is worked with the intarsia technique. If you haven’t seen it, please do go and check it out! Believe it or not, I’ve never really been big on flowers in my designs. I mean, who doesn’t love flowers! Well, I do, but I find they tend to get a bit tacky sometimes in crochet. So, I’d never even thought about doing flower design before. But when I saw Sandra’s design I was blown away. Now, I don’t tend to work by other people’s pattern, I can hardly manage working my own patterns without changing them each time! Therefore, I decided to do some flowers on my own, for the first time! So, a huge thanks to Sandra for her flowery inspiration. Turns out flowers CAN be cool!

And now, for some practical stuff, I wanted the blanket to have this mis matching sort of artisanal tiles look to it, but at the same time I know that you don’t want to be starting at zero with each new type of octagon when working a big blanket. I want it to look complex, but also be able to easily learn the pattern by heart and just crochet happily along while working on it. I designed Fiesta with this in mind. So, you ALWAYS have the same start, whether making the octagons or the two flowery squares. And all the flowers have the same petal design, so they all end the same way as well. All of which just gives a happy simple feel to the making process.

We want to be having fun and not with the nose in the pattern the whole time! They are all different though and then there are soooo many possibilities to make them look even more different, just by the way you arrange your colors.