I wish I was still young enough to trick-or-treat
Greetings folks! I'm back to give the skinny on my latest project!
If any of you read my Red Heart yarn review, then you may remember I mentioned that the reason I took the plunge and bought the yarn was because I wanted to make a blanket for my son. When I wrote my review on the yarn, I was a few squares in to the blanket, and I'm happy to say that having completed the whole thing, I'm still every bit as in love with the yarn as I was then. Phew!
So to get right down in to it, first I'll give you the basics of the blanket design (I'll link the pattern below for anyone who wants to have a crack at it themselves) it's a fairly simple layout - 9 squares and a border around the edges. Obviously there are varying colours and such, I'll get to that further down.
The squares are solid granny squares, and I have to say I really like how these are constructed. Usually in a granny square - solid or traditional - you increase when you get to the corner space where there's a chain2 gap, and into that gap, you put two double crochet, chain two, two double crochet. With this method you always end up with a little gap in the corners, so it's never completely solid.
there ends up being an X shape across your work
However, using the method in this pattern you get a completely solid, and in my opinion, much neater looking square. The difference is that when you get to the last stitch in a side you do two doubles and one treble in that stitch, then one treble and two doubles in the first stitch on the next side, which makes the point in the corner solid, while also increasing the number of stitches in the next round.
Each round ends with a slip stitch and the next round starts with a chain3 and continues as before, the only thing you need to watch out for is that you don't accidentally skip the slipped stitch when you get to the end of the next round, otherwise that side will be one stitch short. Because of the way each row is almost fastened off before the next one begins, it made changing colours very easy, and the join between the colours is seamless.
The squares worked up quite quickly, I would be able to get a whole one done while I was sitting watching TV in the evening. Once the squares were done, it was time to start the faces.
The many faces of Halloween
As you can see in the picture above, four of the squares have assorted faces, and one says 'Boo!'. The faces were easy enough to make, although I found with some of them there were still a lot of gaps showing between the stitches when they were finished. For example, the triangle eyes and noses were quite 'gap-y' and so were the oval shaped eyes on the second face from the left in the picture above. The instructions tell you to leave a long tail after you fasten off, so I left an extra long tail and used a yarn needle to weave the yarn in and out of the stitches to fill in the gaps.
The 'Boo!' was slightly more difficult, to make. The two letter 'O's were fine, as was the exclamation mark. The 'B' was slightly trickier, and it ended up looking like a number 8. It took a fair amount of manipulating it, when I was stitching it to the square, to get it to look like a 'B'.
Once all the faces were done, it was just a matter of stitching them on to the various squares. One thing I will say is plan carefully when you're putting the face pieces on to the squares - I'll go in to a bit more detail about this further down. I found the easiest way to get the faces right was to lay the square out flat and then pin the pieces down before sewing them on. It would be extremely rare that I'd pin anything in crochet. In fact, I don't think I've ever done it before, however it was the best way to keep all the pieces in the places you want them, because I found that even the piece I was working on tended to move around a lot as I was sewing it - I'd leave the pins in right until I had the whole piece pretty much sewn on.
Never have I been happier to finish seaming a piece together
Next step was sewing all the pieces together. It said on the pattern to sew the pieces together using the back loops only. It didn't specify what sort of stitch to use, so I used a mattress stitch to give as seamless a join as possible. Mattress stitch is a fairly strong stitch - it's also used to sew sleeves and seams in sweaters, so I figured this would be a good robust stitch which would be capable of standing up to a vigorous toddler.
Sewing through the back loops only was a bit of a faff, to be honest. There ended up being a gap where 4 pieces intersected, which I had to go back and sew tighter when the whole thing was completed. The way I put it together was I sewed the top three squares together, then the middle three, and then the bottom three, so that I ended up with three long strips. I then sewed the strips together.
I mentioned earlier about planning the layout of the faces carefully, the reason I say this is because when you're sewing the pieces together through the back loops, it's hard to weave in tail ends of yarn neatly. When you lay out your face pieces, do it so that when they're sewn on, the yarn tail from the square will be pointing towards the outside of the blanket. Similarly, when you're sewing the pieces together, rotate the multicoloured pieces so that their yarn tail is pointing towards the outside as well. Obviously, you won't be able to do this with the 'BOO!' square, because it's in the centre. The first round of the border is just double crochets, so the yarn tails from the squares can be woven in neatly and securely with those stitches.
Before your boder is on, the blanket should look like some sort of Halloween amoeba
Once the pieces were sewn together, the border was a piece of cake. The first round was just double crochets using the grey yarn, then the second round was 'shells' using the black yarn. A 'shell' is when you make a single crochet, skip two stitches, put 5 double crochets in the next stitch, skip two stitches, then repeat all the way around.
So there you have it! The Halloween blanket is finished and my little boy is delighted with it. He's been sleeping under it every night since I gave it to him. I think overall it took me about 10 days to finish it. I really like this pattern, and I think it's something that could be adapted quite easily to be used for a different occasion, like Christmas, Valentine's day, etc.
Yarns: RedHeart.com
2 x Red Heart Super Saver #312 Black
2 x Red Heart Super Saver #254 Pumpkin
1 x Red Heart Super Saver #356 Amethyst
1 x Red Heart Super Saver #400 Grey Heather
1 x Red Heart Super Saver #672 Spring Green
Pattern: Pumpkin Face Throw
