Wow, I make a lot of blankets! Yes, I know I've said it before, and to be honest I'll probably say it again. For example, I still have the disastrous rainbow ripple blanket to finish, or my small spotty blanket. Also the Star Wars intarsia blanket I haven't touched since I last blogged about it two years ago, or the two C2C blankets for my nieces. I'd also quit like to make a blanket for my grandma one day very soon (tm). But this post isn't about any of those however. This post is about a blanket that I was posting about two years, and one that I actually finished. This post is about my Square-a-day blanket.
About three years ago I had the fantastic idea that I could easily create a blanket with very little effort. All I had to do was to create one square every day for a year. I even had a great starting point - Crochet to Go by Ellen Gormley, a book that I had previously picked up in the Range, though is easily available on Amazon.
Unfortunately, as with any "resolution" to do things on a daily basis (I haven't kept my promise to go to the gym regularly for about 4 years, for example) I often faltered in my goal and it took much longer than a year to complete the requisite number of squares. And as much as I had promised myself to do every square out of the Crochet to Go book, I regularly browsed the internet looking for....well....more interesting squares. Using as many scrap ends as possible, the patterns I used in the end are as follows:
Square patterns from Ellen Gormley's "Crochet to Go!" book, published by D&C:
- Puddles Gather Rain
- Eyelets
- Oscar Square
- Cherry Cordial
- Pick a Posie
- Team Captain
- Star Power
Patterns found online:
- Manghan linen stitch square by Dedri at Look At What I Made
- Sweetest Baby Blanket found on Moogly blog
Other patterns:
- Standard granny square
- Solid Granny square
- Circle in a square pattern (improvised!)
In the end I had to do slightly more than a years worth of squares, as 365 squares don't really make an even rectangle, so there were 374 squares in total Still fewer squares than my sock weight My Little Pony blanket though, which had 493! I finished crocheting the squares in August of 2016 (wow, that was forever ago!) and it took me a whole month to join them all together in a simple SC join!
For the border, I had some wonderful hand-dyed rainbow yarn from Arwen Makes. (She has an etsy store, though we conducted my custom order through her Facebook page). The yarn was wonderfully soft, and exactly to my specifications. I had two skeins dyed and caked up, and they edged the blanket wonderfully, and I still have one whole gradient left over (about half of a cake) which I intend to use to edge the Spotty blanket I'll probably never finish!!
I didn't want the border design to detract too much from the rainbow gradient, so I opted for a simple scalloped edge. I did consider adding little picots to the top of the scallops, but it really did look too busy so I scrapped it pretty early on.
The end result was a wonderfully large blanket which managed to cover most of my (UK) double bed. It's incredibly warm and - unlike my Truly Hooked blanket - it has held up well in the face of repeated washing over the last two years. There has been a small amount of fading in the hand dyed border, but very little colour bleeding into the surrounding yarns. It has also been peed on by the resident Hellbeasts, and so I'v put the lack of colour bleeding down to the fact that the cream edging yarn was not natural merino as in the TH blanket, but cream Wilko acrylic. Cheap and cheerful!
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