My crochet granny square blanket

This week I finally finished my crochet granny square blanket! It was my very first crochet project, which I started as part of my learning to crochet process. It's not perfect, but I like to think that I've come a long way since my very early crocheting, and of course in the meantime I have also completed another crochet afghan and made a good start on my sky blanket. 

The blanket involved an awful lot of work, sewing together the squares seemed to go on forever, not to mention going around and around the border! But I got there in the end, and I'm so proud of it.

I made up the pattern as I went along, but it's really very simple. The blanket is made of 117 granny squares, arranged in a rectangle which is 9 squares across and 13 squares in length. Each square has five rounds, with colours chosen at random from a blue/purple/grey/cream palette, with the final round always in the same blue. The blanket has a border with one row of half trebles in the main blue, then ten rows of trebles (two rows per stripe), finished with a scalloped border.

In terms of yarn, the main blue that forms the outer round of each square is a Hobbycraft value yarn which I bought a few years ago, and most of the other yarn was given to me by my Mum from her stash. Some of the border rows are Red Heart yarn from the extra that I was kindly given by Make it Coats for my Sky Blanket. The cream scalloped edge is crocheted using Patons yarn that was left over from my previous crochet afghan. So it's all a bit of a mixture!

The border took a bit of fiddling with to get it right and it still doesn't lie entirely flat, but it's not too bad. The first row was a row of half trebles in the blue border colour, to smooth it all out a bit. Then I did rounds of trebles. It was starting to curve out a little around the squares, so for the first four rows I decreased stitches as I went around, first from the stitch in the middle of the square and then at the point at which the rows joined.

It was curling up quite a lot, and I eventually realised that this was because I was going around the edge of the blanket in circles, so from row seven I started alternating directions and this sorted out the curling, next time I'll remember to do this from the beginning!

The border took up a lot more yarn than I had anticipated - I estimated that a 100g ball did about 2 1/2 rounds. I turned to the Red Heart yarn set aside for my Sky Blanket as I have more than I'm expecting to use for that project (I really hope that I'm right!) which meant that the border was made with paler colours than I would perhaps have chosen, but I couldn't really justify buying more yarn when I had so much around.

The corners I made up as I went along. For a while I chained four stitches across the corner, but this was making quite large holes so I changed to doing a couple of trebles into the corner hole, chaining two, and then another couple of trebles into the hole, which filled it up nicely.

I didn't plan it that way, but it has ended up exactly the right size for a single bed! We probably won't use it for a bed though (unless one of the children particularly wants to!) instead I'll add it to our collection of blankets that we snuggle under while we are watching television. It's nice to have a selection!

This granny square blanket was a lot more work than I had anticipated - a huge amount of squares, all that sewing up and then the seemingly never ending border! It hasn't put me off trying another one though, but with my Sky Blanket keeping me busy every day I think I'll be concentrating on some smaller projects for the time being!