It's all been about granny squares this week. A three week break from any kind of crafting (well that did feel a bit odd - not quite right!) finally ended when I picked up a lovely book in the library last weekend. A very wet/dreich afternoon in Stornoway saw me dashing in to our local library to see if they had any nice craft books and they did - excellent! I picked up Crochet Squares by Susan Pinner -a lovely inspiring book full of great granny square project patterns.
It didn't take long before I was, well . . . . grannying away!
I love this granny square pattern. I'm using some oddments from my stash of worsted weight yarn (a US weight somewhere between DK and aran) - I've acquired various colours in this weight from crocheting beanies, slippers, scarves, etc using American patterns. A couple of balls of yarn leftover from Christmas crafting which didn't quite get done in time too!
The author of the book seems to use two yarns held together (one merino DK and one acrylic DK) quite often but I found that using my worsted weight did the job. I am using two yarns held together for the cream background as I came across some DK acrylic yarn in a VERY OLD stash of yarn (recovered from the family home when we were clearing it out a number of years ago) and also some lovely bottle green yarn from this same stash - this should give my crochet blanket some "genuine vintage granny" credentials - don't you think!
My plan is only to use what's in my stash - the beauty of it is that is contains all my favourite colours of course! Mostly I'm using quite soft landscape colours - greens, browns, mustardy yellows, a little dash of beige, and to add a little 'pop' to my colour scheme I'm adding a cheerful sky blue in small amounts here and there. The lovely soft pink and golden yellow are Vannas Choice I think - purchased to make crcochet slippers, but alas . . . . anyhow they haven't gone to waste now!
This is a fab book - I think it will be one to buy for my craft book collection when my birthday comes around later in the summer as I really don't want to have to return it to the library!
I'm using a 5.5 mm hook with my worsted weight yarn (and sometimes doubled up yarns) - each of my sqaures measures about 13.5 cm (about 5.25"). If I make 100 squares I would have a blanket approx 135 cm x 135 cm - that would be cool for a bed throw I'm thinking - I'm being VERY optimistic though but I'm going to see how it goes - it's a great background project anyway, yippee!
I started this as I was waiting for some yarn to arrive for a special knitted project for myself. This yarn has arrived but I've got so wrapped up in my blanket (ooops, pardon the pun!), it''s been sidestepped a bit - I'll leave it for another post :)
Do you think I'll ever finish my blanket - it would be great if I could. I'm thinking it will be a lovely Summer project to pick up and drop whenever the notion takes me.
Alison x
4 comments:
I think a blanket sounds like a fine idea Alison, the colours look good as well. Just keep pulling the project out every now and then and you'll have one made in no time x
Quite "strange" to see you back to crochet!!!!! But so lovely!!!! ;oD
enjoy your grannies, xxxxxx Ale
A blanket with these pretty squares will be a wonderful project.
Testing :)
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