I'm obsessed with little granny squares at the moment! I just love how they look and the colour schemes are endlessssssss! They are also perfect for stash busting.
I get so many questions about how to chose colours and colour placement so I thought I'd talk you through how I did that for this blanket, hopefully it will help you when you are planning colour placement for your granny square blanket or maybe you'd like to make one just like mine!
I have all my acrylic yarns wound onto pegs. This saves me having to get all the full balls out to plan colour schemes and I can move the pegs around easily to see what goes with what and maybe more importantly what doesn't! I made all my own pegs but there are businesses that offer this service, Etsy is a good place to find one.
I see colour inspiration in almost everything! Fabrics, wallpapers, clothes, illustrations, nature............colour is literally everywhere. The inspiration for this blanket just came from a fabric I'd seen and I played around with my pegs until I got my combo just how I wanted it.
I'm using Scheepjes Colour Crafter, it's my favourite acrylic and comes in loads of shades. For the granny squares I used 8 colours - Spa, Goes, Drachten, Venlo, Ameland, Nijmegen, Burum and Barneveld and I joined with Verviers. I buy my Colour Crafter from my favourite independent yarn shop Snufflebean Yarn.
I made three-round grannies and started by making round one for each of my 8 colours. I made 7 round ones for each colour making 56 in total.
When I start round two I get my first pile of 7 round ones which are all the same colour, let's say Spa, and I use each of the remaining colours to make round two for all the Spa round ones. I take each pile of round ones in turn and do the same thing. This gives you a nice equal distribution of colours.
For round three I find it useful to line up my balls of yarn and take each colour pile of round twos and lay them on the balls of yarn so that once again you've got an equal distribution of colours.
I made all 56 and was originally going to have a 7 x 8 blanket but then decided I would like to have a square blanket so made an extra 8 more grannies to make an 8 x 8 square.
Once you've got all your grannies made BE GOOD AND WEAVE YOUR ENDS IN!
Then comes the exciting part, joining! I love this part. I used continuous join as you go which is a way of joining all the squares without stopping! It's quick and there are next to no ends to weave in at the end. It's easier than it looks and there are lots of tutorials online. Heather at The Patchwork Heart has a good one on her blog. Once you've mastered it you'll never look back.
You might find it useful at this stage to plan your square order by laying them all out on a table or floor so you can make sure they are randomly placed or you can be impatient like me and just get on with the joining! As there's 8 colours it's fairly easy to keep it random by just using one of each colour on each row avoiding same colours next each other.
I joined my squares with Verviers. You'll need two balls if you're joining 56+ squares. After joining I crocheted a couple more granny rounds with verviers and finished with a shell edging in barneveld.
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Thank you, Faye x
