I just realized that I haven't written this up yet, so I "borrowed" the lawn next door for a quick photo session this morning, and here it is! This is of course the Granny Square Sampler Afghan, following the project led by Blair Stocker in 2012. (There is also a Flickr group, for more inspiration.) I really enjoyed this, and learned a lot about crochet -- which was the point, after all.
There are two different join-as-you-go methods here -- one (demonstrated here by Annette of My Rose Valley) that is more-or-less adding another round of granny clusters to a square but instead of working a chain st or two in between, reaching up to work one of those ch sts through the ch space in the square you are joining to, and another method (demonstrated here at Carina's Craftblog) in which you work another row of granny clusters but alternate attaching it to the bottom square or the top square, essentially flipping every other cluster "upside down". I like both of these methods, but I think that with my "crazy" layout, the "flipping" one was much more efficient, and so after joining two sets of four squares with the former, I found myself using the latter method for pretty much everything else. I think I made it a bit harder on myself by joining the squares free-form, as there are a number of slight wobbles all over, due to fiddling the number (or size!) of clusters, but wool, bless it, blocking disguises any number of irregularities. If I do another of these -- and why not, it's a great stash-buster, and would certainly never be boring -- I will probably use Adaiha's tutorial for joining squares of different sizes.
I didn't use one of the squares Blair did, and added in some, including "Nana's Latte Square", which I will definitely use again (I love the soft neutrals in solid squares, in the photo from PDKlein on the Ravelry page). I really liked the Granny Wheel Square, so much that I made two in quick succession -- it's interesting how a color change can give a quite different effect. The "little bit of white" in single crochet on my first one (now towards the upper right corner) isn't really enough, but the speckly line is not uninteresting. The other "new" square is Granny On Point. Inadvertently, I didn't really follow the instructions, because I was looking at a photo of someone else's square in the Granny Sampler photo pool at Flickr at the same time, and found myself, to my later amazement -- I don't crochet! really! -- following the photo as though it were a chart of instructions. It's that light-bulb moment, when after months of not understanding what you are doing or quite what you're looking at when you've done it ("is that a double-crochet or a triple? wait, how do you make a half-double, where's my cheat sheet ...") things finally begin to make sense. I used different borders on each of them, because I could.
For the edging on my afghan, I used the brilliantly simple variation on granny clusters by Jacquie at Bunny Mummy, which she calls Double V Edging.
There is so much to learn about pulling a loop of yarn with a hook. The afghan looks great - samplers are fun!
Posted by: Sarina | June 05, 2020 at 06:13 PM