Donation: Square Motif Baby Blanket

About a year ago I had the itch to use up some of the yarn in my stash. Making baby blankets the way I do results in a lot of leftover yarn since I buy it by the pound, but don't use the entire pound for that blanket. I obviously try to buy only when I need that color, but every new blanket requires buying at least a pound of the major color.

This time around I thought I'd try something more complicated than the rainbow blanket I made the last time I had this itch. So I decided to do a square motif blanket and donate it to the same friend's school silent auction that I donated the last blanket too.
Circle in a square motif blanket

Circle in a square motif blanket, full picture

Main Info

Thoughts from the process

I made this a while ago and didn't realize that I forgot to write a blog post about it until just now, when I'm about to donate it. So I don't remember as much about the process as I would if I wrote a post soon after.

I do remember that this blanket was ambitious because I was doing a lot of color changes. Each square had three different colors. This therefore meant 6 ends to weave in for every square, all 25 of them. That's 150 ends and doesn't count the white yarn to stitch the squares together!

I also tried really hard to make each square unique. Though I did end up making the same square by mistake. Above is a picture before I stitched the squares together. If you look carefully you'll see the duplicate square. This picture is my final square order plan, I took it in case the squares got mixed. I was trying to keep the colors as spread out as possible, no sections of the same color touching.
To stitch them together I used single crochet with white yarn. I had never used that stitch for this before and it was interesting when going from one square to another after I'd already connected things in the other direction. It also made the square edges "raised" and an obvious front and back for the blanket. The squares definitely needed the white border, so they "popped" out more. However the raised aspect of it bothers me, though I'm not sure why.

If/when I do a square motif blanket again, I think I'll stick to one color per square, unless I'm willing to put in a huge time investment. The the myriad of colors effect is pretty cute, I'll admit, but solid colored squares I think would have been almost as cute. Though thinking about it, a solid color square would have prevented me from using the really small scraps of yarn....hmmm, maybe that's why I did it this way.

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