I’ve been making squares for a while, Esther Dijkstra published a ‘crochet along’ last year on her blog for a blanket called Nuts About Squares which I fancied making. I started it in the autumn spring (oops, I don’t know what time of year it is anymore) and then got side tracked with Christmas stockings before I got round to writing anything about it.
Esme’s Winter Cottage by Dedri Uys
It’s a great pattern – she has collected a load of 12″ square patterns from different designers who agreed to be part of it and put them together to make a big blanket, she has made all the squares up to the same number of stitches so you can join them easily and published yardage for different weights of yarn and for a border and it’s lovely.
Spiro Star by Helen Shrimpton
All of the squares are a little bit unusual or interesting to make so it’s has been really fun working through them, some of them are slightly fiddly and some just use common stitches in a particular combination to make shapes that look a bit different.
Denna by Polly Plum
There are three of most of the squares in different colour combinations so you can get the hang of a pattern without getting bored of having to make thirty five of them (it is five squares by seven) although I am considering making thirty six because why would you call a blanket Nuts About Squares and then have an almost square number of squares? Also if it is six by six and the whole blanket is square then it will fit better on the bed.
Le Vesinet by Sigrun Hugoey
The instructions use six colours, I didn’t use the ones she suggested because I didn’t really like the brown so I picked a main colour that was closer to grey. I’m not too sure about it but by the time there is a whole blanket of it, it will look like it is meant to be there.
Rachel by Melissa Green
I tried explaining to Man in the Shed about how lovely all the squares are and how clever the designs are and what is special about them all but he just said something along the lines of “Yes, Dear” and wants to know why am making another blanket but he has been hiding in the garage (he doesn’t have a shed at the moment but the Man in the Garage doesn’t sound so good and you might think I had swapped him for a different one!) to make a Scalextric lap counter thingy with a big seven segment LED display that he can control with a Raspberry Pi even though he already has a perfectly good lap counter where you can set the number of laps and it beeps at you when you have finished and tells you your best time and everything so I think we are quits now.
Bavarian Beauty by Heather Gibbs
I haven’t quite finished all the squares yet, I’ve got a couple more to do before I show you the rest but here is another thing. I have always had a bit of trouble with startitis but I am generally a lot better at finishing things off than I used to be. This is going to be a blanket for Tiny to go on her bed, it is a Stylecraft pattern. I’m am struggling with it a little bit because when I bought it I thought that the order of the stripes repeated and it doesn’t, there is a sequence in that the middle colours of each stripe repeat but the outer ones change each time and the instructions for the motifs in the centre of the squares tell you to use random colours but my brain won’t let me do that so I am using the three colours from each stripe to make a motif that matches it which also means it makes it less monotonous to alternate the stripes with the squares. Tiny doesn’t have an issue with the colours being random, I have instilled a good appreciation of pretty rainbow order colours in her but most of the time she just throws anything she likes together so she is very pleased with it and keeps telling me to get on with the her big square instead of my little ones. Yes, Miss! I’m going back to work now!
