This project was inspired by the free Red Heart baby blanket designed by Lucy at attic 24, but I did not follow the pattern, only the layout of it. It is more of a heavily modified version. I love the staggered sized granny squares. I loved how the pattern used a lot of colors. I saw some fabric that I liked the colors and I used photoshop to pick most of the colors from it, and translate into yarn. The graph I have uploaded will show just what I mean. Then I had some purple yarn on hand and decided to add that to the mix too. I haven’t decided if I am going to put a mix of tiny granny squares in the corners to make up a medium or even a large granny square yet. This blanket I will be winging it completely and there are no set rules, but simply just a fun project for the sake of being fun :)

Update: April 3, 2012… Some post project notes for anyone wondering.

Thank you everyone for all the kind comments regarding this project. This was my very first granny square blanket, and it was inspired by Lucy at Attic 24. She made a beautiful and brightly colored multi sized granny blanket that I just fell in love with. When I first started this project, I picked colors from a swatch of fabric in photoshop, and then went about matching those colors up closely as I could with the Red Heart Yarns. Then I went on a shopping spree to pick some of the colors and ended up adding a few more to the project, which I ended up with 15 colors total. I wanted to spread the colors out as much as possible so this is what I did. I made 15 of each color for the centers. Then I lined up the yarns and went down the line and added the second color with the exception of the 15th one because I didn’t want the center to be the same as the next row on the last one. So I charted which one in line as the first one, and had one repeat of that one. Then the next color did the same, but with the left over square made a repeat of the 2nd color in the line up, and down the line I went doing this over and over, until working my way through all 15 colors for that extra square. Then I sorted all the squares by their 2nd color border, and went down the line that way, until I had a bunch of squares made up to the 3rd color in the round. There will be a few repeats but just make sure that when you get to those repeats to do a different 3rd color that none of the centers and second color is the same. Keep going until you have a total of 247 squares. This gave me a big variety, yet was somewhat random. Then I went through and made stacks with one of each outer color in the stack and made rows. The only rule was to use one of each color in the row as I went.

Since the single rows had 16 squares, I had to repeat one color. The rows with the bigger squares took 17 squares (with the big squares which I will get to in a minute) and had to repeat 2 colors on the outer border. I did the crochet as you go method with attaching them. If you do a web search for the crochet as you go for granny squares, you will find several tutorials, as I didn’t want to have to sew them together. I was just careful to try to not have the outer colors touching and if an area was getting kind of dark, I just made sure to add some of the lighter colors next to it as I went along. I would watch to see which balls of yarn were getting smaller as I went along, and used the “bigger” balls in building the larger squares to keep things somewhat even. Then as I built the bigger squares, I would take one of the small squares from the stack and build on to them as I went. I kept one stack in reserve at all times to pull from to add on to the extra squares since I only had 15 colors. I would just work my way through that extra stack to use it up. This helped to keep me from repeating on the ends too much with those additional squares that I needed. I got pretty close to using up most of the yarns by the time I finished all the squares, and I did need to purchase more yarn to go around the borders as there just was not enough yarn of any one color after I finished going around the border. I used the method to make sure my border was flat (again, google that technique as the foundation round of granny squares determines if your border is going to grow and ruffle, and I wanted to have it lay flat without having to block the blanket). This blanket was sort of random, but then it wasn’t random with the way I went through to ensure there was a pretty even color distribution of all the colors. No 2 squares are the same in this blanket. I wanted to make sure to highlight that this is my first ever granny square to hopefully encourage anyone that feels intimidated not to be! I have listed the colors and yarn choices that I used for anyone that wants to do this. If you have never done a granny square project before, please don’t be intimidated. Just let your creativity go wild and you too can do this. The big squares are 8 rows of color and the smaller squares are 4 rows of color. I hope my explanation makes sense to anyone reading..

Post note: I also wanted to highlight that the photos have come out a bit more “blue” than the actual color of the blanket. My camera doesn’t like color for some reason and never gets a really true snapshot of any color. If you look at some of the close up photos, they are a little better in showing it closer to the real thing :)