Homely Blanket

I can hardly believe it’s true, but YAY: I’ve finished my homely blanket!
And what’s more: I am so loving it!

This blanket all started on Instagram, when people picked up on a project the talented Heike (Made with Loops-blog) had begun. She was asked for the patterns of the beautiful squares she was crocheting and before we knew it, she shared them all on her blog – a “crochet-along” was born. Such a generous, caring and sharing thing to do – she’s just the best! If you’re on Instagram, do look for the hashtag “homelyblanket”, you’ll see lots of pretty squares.

Crocheting all of Heike’s so beautifully designed squares was a pure joy. I learned a lot of new stitches/techniqes and really liked that part of this ‘cal’ too.
Coming up with a way to put these gorgeous squares together was kind of a struggle though. It took me a long time and much deliberation, before I decided to do it the way I ended up assembling this beauty.

You see, the spare room floor was covered with these squares for a quite a few months – and since I do my ironing there as well, I pondered and pondered for a long time over a lay-out while ironing …..

Nothing really sat well enough with me to get going, but a couple of weeks ago I felt so silly about my continuous hesitance that I forced myself to pick a joining color and get going. And that’s what I did – it turned out to be as simple as that.

There were roughly three groups of differently sized squares and I crocheted grey borders on all squares to size them up. That still left me with some holes to fill up, which I did by crocheting little squares/rectangles in grey. After that the fun job of deciding on the final lay-out started. As soon as that was done, I began joining by double crocheting (US: sc) in the back loops of the squares, really liking the flat seams on the front. Shelley (Spincushions blog) has a fantastic tutorial on joining here, btw.

As always when I’m crocheting the last leg of a project, I tried to think of a pretty border that would fit this blanket. Given the great variety of patterns and colors in the blanket itself, I did not want the border to be too frilly, so I stuck to a simple block stitch, thus framing the blanket in the same color as the one I used for joining, with only little hints of colors. You’ll find a great tutorial on the block stitch at Alessandra’s lovely blog, here.
The last round was all dc’s and little 3-chain picots in grey.

And then, all of a sudden: it was finished! Happy, happy feeling!
Some details:
* there are 70 colored squares in this blanket, 35 have the same design
* 10 x 7 rows plus border, equals 104 cm x 139 cm
* weight: 1.25 kg

Love,
Marianne