Hopefully you will have seen the previous post here in which I showed you how I started making a granny square blanket from a whole bunch of scrap yarn I had lying around. The next thing to do once you have all your squares, is to join them up!
I had in my mind, an idea of how I might like to join them. I didn't want to just sew them directly together for two reasons 1- because they looked too bright right next to each other; and 2- I am not a great sewer, and my poor skills would have been exposed in this type of project. What I was thinking about was some kind of border that linked all the squares but also created a border around the whole thing while being flat, even and uniform.
Leonie over at Kiwi at Heart kindly shared with me this join as you go method. I looked at it so many times, but I just couldn't figure out how I could make this method work for my squares. Perhaps it was the mathematic formula at the start of the post that put me off? (I lost the ability to do maths once I left high school!). What I had envisaged was some kid of granny border, and I came across this tutorial after some big time googling!! It was exactly the kind of join I was looking for- a "granny join" Once I read through the instructions, I realised in order to get my blanket to have the same uniform border, I would need to do a border around each of my granny squares so that when I joined them, the outline and the border would be the same colour. (If you don't know what I'm talking about, definitely have a look at the tutorial in the above link again!)
So I this point I needed to make a decision about what I wanted my border colour to be. A popular choice for granny blankets is black. In my opinion, black would make my blanket to gypsy-like, not the look I was going for. My go-to colour for ANY project is alway a pale grey (have a look here, here, here and here to see what I mean), but I didn't think grey would make the blanket as fresh looking as I wanted. So I decided on white. As is always my downfall, I chose a stupid yarn that wasn't really fit for purpose! It's called "Stallion" and was all fluffy and stringy and kept separating every time I was making a new stitch. I didn't take any pictures of me doing the borders for each square, but all I did was one round of the white for each square in treble crochet.
Lining everything up to make sure the lengths are more or less equal |
Who's with me on hating sewing in threads?! |
You can see in the photos that where four granny squares intersect each other, the joining isn't very precise and actually quite loose. I am sure this is because of the treble crochet stitch, and also the type of yarn I was using.
And then to really finish it off, I did another little edging in my favourite colour! The edging is just something I made up as I was running a little low in the grey yarn. I did one full round of double crochet, then the next round I did 3 single crochet in the gaps of the double crochet groups, and chain 3 between each group of single crochet. For the corners I did 3 groups of three. It was quite an economical border, and understated, which is what I was going for!
I do have to apologise for the terrible lighting that doesn't allow the gorgeous bright colours of this blanket to show up! Here in Wellington we are currently experiencing the longest stretch of cloudy weather EVER! So it's difficult to photograph in natural light!
And very please to be linking in two weeks in a row with Show & Tell! Be sure to check out the other links!
All in all I'm REALLY pleased and proud with how this project worked out. I'm really keen to have a go at another granny square blanket! It's now in it's new home in my little boy's bedroom on his couch. It will make a cold leather couch nice and cosy come wintertime!
I do have to apologise for the terrible lighting that doesn't allow the gorgeous bright colours of this blanket to show up! Here in Wellington we are currently experiencing the longest stretch of cloudy weather EVER! So it's difficult to photograph in natural light!
And very please to be linking in two weeks in a row with Show & Tell! Be sure to check out the other links!
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