The Granny Square Expiriment

I had all but given up on making granny squares because they would always turn out floppy. I don't feel my tension is off and I count properly - 3 dc ch 1 then 3 dc ch 2 3 dc on the corners. Upon watching a tutorial about Tunisian crochet, I saw someone do "blocking." Basically all you do is get some foam pads and pin your work strait and steam it. Voila! - it stays in place forever!

This made me want to do a granny square again more than ever! I do get sick of going round and round so I decided to do something I had never done before... make a ton of small ones and connect them. SO I investigated again on a new technique. How the hell do I connect them without making a ton and putting them together at the end? TEDIOUS! The answer was within a video. Join as you go. Excellent.

I didn't want it to look the same in all squares so I used the granny square colors generator. All you do is pick your colors and tell it how many squares you want with how many colors and it randomly creates different squares. I had to refresh quite a few times until I found one that was pleasing to my eye.

This is the result. It took about a month by the time I could do 2-3 squares in an evening after work prior to bed.

 I chose I Love This Yarn brand White, Greymyst, Greybeard, and Glacier for this project.

When it was done, the effect of joining as you go leaves an almost diagonal step look. Blocking and bordering helps with this. You almost can't tell! If you look closely, you can see that I had to be a bit creative to do the first border of white around the entire blanket. Where the squares join, there isn't a large space so I had to put one dc in the space before, one dc in the middle space, and one dc in the space after to make a faux (3) dc space. This gives the illusion of continuing with the pattern as planned. It does have to stretch a tiny bit further but in the end you can't really tell unless you are REALLY looking for it.

Not sure what lucky baby is going to get this soft blankie yet but I will know when the time comes :)

My favorite part about this? No floppy blanket!