The Obligatory 'Wren' Blanket Square

In which Wren bemoans the lack of wrens immortalised through the art of knitting, decides to do it herself, and goes quickly insane.

Well, it had to be done.  You can't have a Wren-knitted blanket without a wren square, can you?

The first problem was, it turns out to be surprisingly difficult to find knitting patterns featuring wrens.  As in, impossibly difficult.  Zilch. None. Nada.  I couldn't find anything that would work.  So, I decided to design my own.  "How hard could it be?" I thought.  Yeah, have you seen my last post?  I'm not good with ambition vs my actual abilities.

I armed myself with some graph paper and a pencil.  Having recently completed my own (really pretty simple) designs for a Leo symbol and some hearts, I was feeling pretty confident.  Rather dangerously confident.  Because the second problem was: wrens are really a bit weird looking, when you get down to it.  Almost spherical, with surprisingly long, thin beaks, and their tails cocked almost vertically behind them.  If you already know what a wren looks like, then you'll recognise a drawing of one straight away.  If not, you'll think it's a drawing of bird done by someone who's really not very good at drawing birds...

The way I described it to my boyfriend was that "they look like normal birds - only gone a bit wonky".  At this point he made some unfavourable comparisons between this description and myself, which for the purposes of romance we shall gloss over.

Anyway, I was worried that the uneducated might see the blanket and just think it was a wonky bird.  However, I can't help the way wrens look - and if I was going to put a damn wren on the blanket then it was damn well going to look like a damn wren.  (I was starting to get a little frustrated at this point).  So I sat down and drafted a wren pattern.  And then did it again.  And again.  And again.

Herein lay the third problem.  A sensible, organised and patient person would have taken the very messy draft and spent some time redrawing it into a neat and easily readable final copy.  Unfortunately I am neither sensible, nor am I organised or patient.  I was excited about starting this square, so I jumped right in, semi illegible pattern and all.

I swore.  I got a cracking headache.  I swore some more.  I had to unpick entire rows.  I swore a lot more.  It took about five times as long as any other pattern that size had taken me.  But I finished.  And in the end, I really am quite proud of how it looks...

I could, of course, have left it at that.  However, a) I'd just discovered this cool little online knitting pattern generator, and b) as far as I knew, I had just created the world's only flat worked-afghan square-intarsia-wren-design.  What if, somewhere, somehow, someday somebody else wanted to knit a wren blanket square?  What would they do?  I felt I owed it to that unlikely future person to make the design available.

And so we come to the fourth and final problem.  My hand drawn design, illegible enough to begin with, was now covered in scribbles, crossings out and corrections from where I'd been following my stitches as I knitted.  The swearing and headaches were repeated, only this time in technicolour and with surround-sound.

But I did it.  Again.  And if anyone anywhere in the future is ever desperately searching for a wren afghan square, then this, my friend, is for you...

It's free for any non-profit/non commercial use you may wish to put it to!

My version was knitted in Hayfield Bonus Chunky 815 (Grouse) and King Cole Chunky 557 (Seaspray).