Crocheted blanket

I started to crochet granny squares on January. I wanted to do some crafts which I hadn't done in a long time and I wanted to use up scrap yarn that had accumulated in the crafts cabinet. It started out with good intentions. I crocheted many squares with the left over yarn and then realized that in order to make the squares somehow uniform I needed to make the last round to all of the squares with same colour. I decided that colour would be white. So I bought two coils of white wool yarn. And that's when the whole thing went out of hand.

I looked at the squares I had made and noticed how dull they were, the colours were not happy. I had lots of scrap yarn in broken colours and in dark colours. So I bought new yarn, yellow, orange and turquoise coils. Then I had to buy more white yarn because the two I had bought run out. In the end I ended up buying eight new coils. So I kind of lost the point I originally had, but I got nicer squares and used at least some scrap yarn.

Once I had done about hundred of those squares I laid them all on the floor and measured how much space they take. I calculated that on average one square was about 10 cm times 10 cm  ( 4 in times 4 in). Then I measured one wool blanket we already have. That was around 150 cm (4.9 feet) long  and 100 cm (3.3 feet) wide. After some simple math calculations I knew I had to make 150 squares. I made from all colours equal amount of squares, which was then 25 pieces each.

Lets talk math a bit more. On two occasions I checked from the clock that how long it takes me to make one square. It took 20 minutes, give or take a few minutes. So to make 150 squares 3000 minutes is spent, which is 50 hours. 50! If I would work for 8 hours straight each day it would take me one whole week to make those squares. Now I started the project in the middle of January and finished the squares on the middle of March. The 50 hours divided by 60 days is almost one hour a day. I knew I had spent lot of time making those squares but I never thought it was that much. And that is not even taking in count the amount of planning and arranging of the squares and then actually combining them into a blanket.

It was time well spent though.

When I had all squares ready I laid them on the floor and arranged them into a pattern. When I had done that I noticed that the pattern I wanted to create required not equal amount of squares per colour, but two squares were always left with the wrong colour. I hadn't thought of that. But I made two new squares from the right colours. When I was happy with the pattern, I piled the squares in that order and then started to combine the squares.

I combined the squares first into long bunting, then I combined the buntings with other buntings until I had them all connected on each other. Then I attached them from the other direction too. Then I crocheted around all the squares to create a nicer edge. I love the blanket and I love all the colours.

I used Novita's directions (in Finnish) on how to make the blanket.