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Knitting squares for a blanket - an ideal way of using up wool!
The pattern I have used originally came from member Angela Dick, who was knitting squares for charity. I knitted some for her, but then decided I would use the pattern to create a blanket throw, for a double bed, for my daughter's bottom drawer.
As my daughter has a taste for bright (some would say clashing) colours I hunted though my wool bag and found I had seven strong colours in dk. I decided I wanted to work with twelve colours, so I bought an additional five colours from Hobbycraft. This gave me a basic colour mix of six colours but also a dark and light version of each. I decided ten of each colour, giving a total of 120 squares, would be sufficient to cover a double bed.
I had knitted about twenty squares when I became increasingly worried about the 'floppiness' of the squares; would they actually lie flat as a blanket? Would the overall weight of the blanket pull it out of shape? Around that time, I went on holiday to Madeira and visited a local tile museum and while walking through the gallery of classic Italian designs, I decided to turn my squares into tiles!
Using a huge left-over ball of natural Aran, I crocheted a single row of doubles around the edge of each square. I followed this up with two rows of doubles in navy blue double knit. This not only gave the squares structure, but also provided the means by which I would join them together - crochet in navy blue. A further advantage was that if the blanket didn't come out the right size or shape, I could add extra rows of navy crochet around either the individual tiles or the whole blanket.
The carousel of photos shows my starting materials, the floppy squares and finally the 'structured' tiles.
However, I became increasingly bored with knitting the 'same old'. I decided to use the texture itself to make a simple design of two colours; the basket stitch in one colour and the stocking stitch in a contrast. This held my interest for a while but then boredom struck again and I introduced four motifs to knit in the centre of the squares; star, heart, and unicorn (a firm favourite of my daughter). For each colour I was now aiming to knit; four plain, two with alternate bands and one of each motif, giving the ten squares I had originally planned for. This finally kept me focused!
This carousel shows photos of the squares with alternating bands, then a photo of the four motifs. The last photo shows a full set of 10 squares in turquoise.
Finally finished April 2021 - three years in the making!
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