FO: Pläd Mormor (Granny Square Blanket)

Last November, I figured this would be an easy project. 

This really is a quick and easy project, simple enough for a beginner, with the fun of picking out colors to keep me engaged. Too bad I dislike weaving in ends so much - this sat in my WIP basket for a couple of months and I wove in an end here and an end there every once in a while. 

There's a temptation to undo the border and seams and rearrange the squares, maybe add another row of squares, use a different seam, add other colors...but I'm going to call this done. 

Ravelry project notes: Pinteresting Granny Square Baby Blanket

PSA: White yarn comes in dyelots too

Here's an object lesson in dyelots:

Yarn: Brown Sheep Cotton Fleece

There are two different dyelots of Cotton Ball in this baby blanket, and since I was using up small squares and making new squares, the different dyelots aren't evenly distributed throughout the blanket. I just keep telling myself the baby won't care. A few washes and some baby grime may even it all out in the end, and it will be a project finished! 

Project: pläd mormor

If Google Translate is right, pläd mormor is Swedish for "granny square." 

Small granny squares, back side shown

While cleaning up my yarn stash and unfinished projects, I pulled out a bag of small granny squares. Each one is about 2" across. I think my original plan was to make a baby blanket for my niece - and after calculating out how many more squares I'd have to make and seam together to do that (about 50), I opted for a change of plan.  

Granny square blanket, available at Oddbirds.nu

This granny square blanket popped up in my Pinterest feed and looked like just the thing. Only the first round uses a color, with the rest of the block done in white. The overall effect is still colorful, in a clean, modern way. All I needed to do was buy more white yarn, select a handful of the squares, and add a few more rounds. 9 squares are enough to make a baby blanket, so now I just need to weave in ends, block the squares, seam them together, and do a simple border in the same gold color as used for two of the squares. 

Granny squares

Ravelry project: Pinteresting Granny Square Baby Blanket  

Project: Holiday Sanity Scrapghan

My Holiday Sanity plan: crochet granny squares, ideally during my city bus commute, while listening to podcasts.  

Granny squares

Yarn is Brown Sheep Cotton Fleece, which I've been building quite a stash of over the past couple of years (YarnStory in Honolulu has an ever-changing array of colors). My yarn acquisition habit has been to buy single skeins and only occasionally quantities for projects larger than a hat. In this case, that works just fine. I did buy an additional 3 skeins of white for another granny square blanket (and I'll post progress on that later), and had enough left over so that I split one of the skeins into 3 smaller skeins, and used them for dye experiments that I think could work with these colors (will also post progress on that later).  

This is a nice soothing project for me, just the ticket while I'm on the city bus on my way to or from work. It's simple enough so I can pay attention to a podcast. CraftLit is currently doing Age of Innocence, which I haaaaated the first time I read it. I was a teenager, I thought all the characters were horrible people, and I wanted to kick every single one of them in the shins. 20-ish years later, I'm glad I gave it another go. Heather Ordover really knows how to enrich the experience with background information and Literary Links of Interest that explain things like Parma violets and camphor, and Brenda Dayne is a sublime reader (you really can hear it when she arches an eyebrow sardonically). 

Granny square inspired by a textile print

A big part of the joy of doing a granny scrapghan is that I don't have to think about too much besides what color I want to use next. I'm thinking a little bit about how the squares will work together in the end, but since part of the point is to have a cheerful riot of color, I don't think too hard. This isn't to say that I don't think - there are squares where I've ripped back because a color wasn't working, and there are squares like the one above, where I was thinking specifically about something. In this case, an 18th century textile print: 

Waistcoat, French. circa 1770 - 90, cotton fabric (India?). In the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. 

The shades of green and gold, with the pink, red, and blues - reminds me of my childhood (my parents had some very bohemian/hippie friends who had traveled/lived in India, Turkey, Tibet, etc. and Mom did a lot of traveling in Asia and the Middle East during the 60's). Recently, I moved some furniture I had stored at my parents house into where I'm living now, and that includes a rattan loveseat with a riotous mix of pillows in stripes, paisley, ikat (-ish - I don't think it's a genuine ikat weave), and embroidered fabrics. This scrapghan might fit right in.  

Ravelry project: Holiday Sanity Scrapghan