Winter Project Link Up Party

Hello!!! This is an exciting post! It is the first properly dedicated 'Winter Project Link Up Party' post!! You may remember I mentioned that I was joining in with Thistle Bear's party last month (in this post) when I was given some crochet squares from my Aunt. The basic idea is that lots of different bloggers add their links to Thistle Bear's blog and we all check out each other's winter posts, a nice online community thing to get us through the darker months.

So, it has been a month since I mentioned this project, and last time you saw the squares they looked like the picture above.

I spent several days going around the existing squares with two rounds of granny trebles (each stitch going in roughly every three double crochet stitches that made up the solid border) in the cream colour. I wasn't able to exactly match all of the shades that my Aunt had used as she had been hanging on to these balls of wool for a while and the batches were all different. I did manage to find the wool (Sirdar Supersoft Aran) so the texture is all the same, and actually I quite like the different variations on the same colour.

I have had to make a few squares from scratch as I was only given 18, and the hardest thing for me has been matching the tension. I think I have mentioned this before, how everybody has an inbuilt 'comfortable' tension and it is really difficult to try and copy someone who has a tension different to yours. I have discovered that I crochet quite tightly, whereas my Aunt crochets very loosely (it may also be how we hold the crochet hook, she holds hers in a weird way (I think), so that probably doesn't help). My squares have worked out slightly smaller than the original ones even though I was trying really hard to make them bigger, although I don't think it will matter overall.

The other evening I got bored with making up the squares and was desperate to start joining them together! I played around with positionings and different colourways to get a feel for how it should go together.

Kit decided that it was a good time for the squares to have their comfortability test. All blankets should have this test, where you lay it all out on the floor and wait for the cat to discover it. If the cat sits right in the middle of the squares and promptly falls asleep then your blanket has passed the test. If they walk away then you should probably have used a different wool. My blanket squares passed with flying colours!!

So the next few pictures will bring you completely up to date with the blanket. I have spent all week joining the squares as I go, adding another round of cream trebles to make the blanket feel light and airy, and this is how big it currently is...

There is a sort of system in here, each row has alternating fourth granny square round colours. So the last round of granny squares before the double crochet border. One row alternates the green and white, and the next row alternates the dark blue and reddish pink.

It doesn't quite lie flat yet unless you smooth and pull it down so I might have to do a full on carpet blocking at the end. Currently there are four rows of six, so I need two more rows I think to make it square.

It is huge already. Each square, including the three cream granny rows measures roughly 20 centimetres, so it should end up being about 120 centimetres square before I add the border. I have no idea how many balls of wool have been used so far in this section of it- I have used probably half a ball of each colour and three or four balls of the cream, but I don't know how much was used before it was passed to me- possibly just one ball in each colour.

So, on to the technical part of the post. There are lots of different bloggers all linking up their winter projects to THIS post on the Thistle Bear Blog. If you have half an hour to spare have a hop around the web and see what everyone else is up to this Winter. You can even link to your own projects.