One is never enough

Giant granny square blanket - Number 2

So it seems that granny square crochet blankets should come with an advisory health warning. After finishing my blanket last week I found myself sitting in bed on Sunday morning feeling slightly bereft and not sure what to do with myself. So of course I did the only acceptable thing in these circumstances and started another one.

Addicted, nah, not me.

Apologies by the way if you were under the string impression that this is a knitting blog. I promise that normal service will be resumed shortly.

And if you are tempted over to the way of the crochet you might like to know about a CAL over on Instagram. Run by @martushkaknits the #crochetfromyourheart CAL is for any crochet project that you are undertaking this summer. Lots of people are doing scrap yarn granny squares or similar long term projects and it’s really wonderful to see all of their progress. If looking through their fabulous projects doesn’t get you reaching for the crochet hook then nothing will.

A Crochet Success

It’s always a happy day when a finished object coincides with a Finished Object Friday so it’s definitely time for a happy dance as I declare my giant granny square blanket done. Even more so as it’s one of the first crochet projects of mine that I’m truly happy with.

After much deliberation about the border I opted for just 2 rounds of double crochet after the final round of dark purple. I tried a picot edge and it didn’t look right so I opted for the ‘less is more’ approach.

It's based on the Purl Soho Giant Granny Square pattern on Ravelry and I used just over 2000m leftover sock yarn on a 2.5mm hook. No matter what I do I always seem to crochet quite tightly so in the end I just embraced it and I really like the relatively tight fabric it produced. It feels pleasingly substantial without being too heavy and I can see this lap blanket getting an awful lot of use over the coming months.

The only downside is that I can’t share it in my own Everyday Knitter FB Group without breaking our strict ‘no crochet rule’ - which is pretty funny really.

I feel oddly bereft to have finished this now - and I have a strange urge to cast on another one. I think I may be mildly addicted.

Knitting a square in the round

Fuss Free baby blanket knit in West Yorkshire Spinners ColourLab DK

There’s a lot to be said for knitting a square blanket in the round, rather than knitting it flat. I don’t know about you and I’m fairly sure it defies the laws of physics but I’m convinced that a square knit flat takes far, far longer than one knit in the round.

At some point when I have three-quarters of  a square I always start doing a heck of a lot of measuring, certain that after these last few rows I will have knit enough. Or if all else fails I start trying to convince myself that everyone really wants a wide, short rectangular blanket rather than a square one. Obviously they don’t - it would just look weird and exactly like you’d given up three quarters of the way through but such are the tales I try to tell my inner knitter.

Instead I find that if you knit a blanket in the round it’s all bunched up on your needles and you can keep knitting and knitting, through films, kids playparks and all manner of events. It’s easier on the hands and (if you are doing stocking stitch) there’s the added benefit of no purling. It does mean of course that it’s harder to spread it out for photographic/measuring purposes but you can’t have everything and I’d rather just keep knitting so that the eventual size is a happy surprise when I finally bind it off.

If you’d like to try knitting a blanket in the round, as with everything there is more than one way to go about it.

Knit a central square - this is my favourite method and one I come back to time and time again. In my Fuss Free Baby Blanket (a free download on my website) it starts with a central garter stitch square. You then keep the live stitches on the needle, place a marker and pick up the same number of stitches along each of the 3 sides - adding a marker at each corner. You then alternate a mitered increase round with a plain round building up the square from the centre out. Easy peasy. You can add stripes or whatever takes your fancy make the most of fuss free, portable knitting.

The other option is to start with a small number of central stitches - usually on DPNs - and build the increases from there. This can be a bit more fiddly but is perfectly straightforward to master. My basic recipe for this is as follows:

Cast on 8 sts and divide equally across 4 DPNs

Rnd 1: kfb in each st (8 sts inc)

Rnd 2: k

Rnd 3: *kfb, k to last st on DPN, kfb. Rep from * 3 more times (8 sts inc)

Rnd 4: k

Rep rnds 3 and 4 - each increase round adds 8 sts. Once you have sufficient sts you can switch to a circular needle. I like to switch to a 60cm cable once I have about 80sts in total. It might be a bit tight for the first few rounds but as you add more stitches it soon becomes easier.

Two ways of achieving the same result, but both with the nifty feature of avoiding the tedium of an “almost there” blanket knit flat.

False starts and firm opinions

It was the kind of scenario you just couldn’t make up. 

Picture the scene. I am doing a bit of flatlay photography for my one Instagram photo of the week. I’ve got my little blanket project in progress, my coffee still hot and the junk on the bed shoved to the side out of side.

In wanders my eldest son, he glances at the bed and asks if that’s his new blanket I’m working on. “Why yes it is” I answer, “Just like the one you asked for”.

His old baby blanket suffered a sad demise a few years ago, courtesy of our old, incontinent cat and he had been asking for a new one for a while.

He expressed concern that this new blanket, whilst using the same colours ‘looked different’ to how he remembered it. There then followed a slightly confusing conversation which only after careful consultation with my Ravelry project library did we determine that we were in fact each talking of an entirely different baby blanket.

The one I was remembering - a Moderne Baby blanket - of log cabin-like construction had in fact belonged to his brother (oops). The one he was picturing with fond memories was in fact the first baby blanket I ever designed - the Fuss Free Baby Blanket - which starts with a central square knitted flat and then has stitches picked up around that square to be knit in the round.

Realisation dawned as we looked at each other across my lovely flatlay. 

But luckily the central patch would serve just as well for the other blanket and I really hadn’t done more than an hour or two’s knitting on it. 

So, I learnt a valuable lesson. To always check what’s in someone else’s mind when they ask for a knitted something. And he learnt how to frog and rewind yarn!

My first Instagram free week

It isn’t something I’ve come across before, for obvious reasons. But when you haven’t logged in to Instagram for a few days it starts sending you little automated emails. Trying to entice you back to see what you might have missed. Trying to trigger that little bit of your brain that deals with dopamine and addiction. Heck, even trying to make you feel guilty about not showing up.

Seriously. If ever I needed a wake up call that the whole app is designed to draw you in, entice you in and then, crucially, keep you there, then these polite, chirpy ‘look what you are missing’ emails are just the thing.

Happily I can report that these pester emails are now directed to reside in my spam folder along with emails from companies that like to tell me about ‘summer beach body deals’ and strange people from foreign climes trying to send me an inheritance.

I quickly logged in to Instagram for a check in last week. Sunday morning over coffee. I had an hours leisurely scroll which was really rather pleasant and then I logged off to spend an hour doing some gardening - my new favourite thing. It’s really nice, especially in the evening to put the phone down and go and do a bit of gentle pottering about. I’ve never been much of a gardener but we recently had some help clearing our overgrown (I prefer the term nature friendly) garden and I was thrilled to find some old peonies that have survived years of neglect, so now I’m trying not to kill them with kindness.

My other plans for my Insta-break have been rather scuppered by the heat wave we are currently experiencing in my part of the UK. I was planning to do some spinning and get to grips with my drop spindle but it’s been so warm that even looking at a pile of fluff brings me out in sweat.

A friend on Twitter gave me this useful tip for working on larger projects in the heat though - using a small folding lap table to keep the bulk of your project off your legs. We had this ugly old table back from when my husband had surgery a few years ago and I’d stored it away. But it turns out that it’s the perfect size to rest my giant granny square blanket on while I work on it. And there’s room for my coffee too - winner!

If at first you don't succeed...

Soldotna Crop - a work in progress

You might have spotted this WIP before as I’ve shared it online a few times now. Sadly though, despite much ripping and a moderate amount of swearing it still remains a WIP rather than a finished object.

In my planner for the end of July I had optimistically pencilled in “share Soldotna resolution”. This was going to be a perky, uplifting little blog post about how I overcame my issues with the neckline, came up with a pleasing solution and possibly even modeled it for you.

Sadly none of those things happened. I ripped back and ended up going back a bit too far. I sorted that out and tried a 3 stitch i-cord bind off. That rolled something terrible so I tried a 2 stitch i-cord (on smaller needles). It still rolled. I decided to embrace the rolling and knit several rounds of stocking stitch. That looked terrible on me. I thought I would try a few rounds of garter stitch (on smaller needles). And eureka…

...only joking...it still didn’t look right.

So after several hours of cursing I did what any sane knitter would do, threw it in a corner and cast on for a simple, soothing garter stitch blanket.

It’s too hot to knit much this week anyway. There’s going to be a bit of heatwave here in my part of the UK and I will have no need of a colourwork yoke sweater, no matter how cute the short sleeves are.

At least, that’s my argument and I’m sticking to it.

In the meantime i’m hoping that inspiration strikes, from somewhere.