The Blanket has Square Corners!

The blanket I am making for my granddaughter has now been given square corners and all that needs to be done is to add a border.

The sort of border that I want has yet to be decided but here is a square corner!

For anyone who might like to make something similar here are a few details. I will also be sharing details of how I created the design in a number of future posts and I will also share my version of the African Flower hexagon pattern. I know that these longer more detailed posts are not for everyone but I enjoy writing them and they may be helpful to some.

The blanket uses twenty-one colours. There are four shades of each of five different colour families plus grey as a contrast for the edging which makes it into a square.

These are the colours chosen by my granddaughter. All but one is Stylecraft Special DK.

Unlike my normal behaviour when planning a blanket, there is far more yarn needed in terms of 100g balls than are used in the blanket. In fact I have only used about half of each of the twenty main colour balls.

Each motif uses almost exactly 5g that is about 15m or 17yds. However I have been aware when making this blanket, as I have before, that some yarns are thicker than others and so no calculation can be exact. The design, as I have made it, also uses more yarn for some colours than others as will be explained in a future post.

As you can see in the picture of the hexagons above, some hexagons contain only shades from the same colour family and other hexagons have shades from two colour families. These are colours that are adjacent on a colour wheel (counting yellow and orange as the same family).

I pinned the motifs onto a sheet in a tentative arrangement as I completed each set but it took a lot of rearrangement before I was final happy and could start to join them.

I started at one end and carefully unpinned the motifs in the right order and held them on an old baby pin I have,

before removing and joining them one at a time.

I placed a pin in the first motif so I would not lose sight of where the start was.

The motifs have been slip-stitched together on the wrong side, so they abut neatly.

This is how the back looks.

The long sides have been straightened off by adding in half-hexagons

I had to make 22 half hexagons. Here are two sets of eleven for each side pinned together.

and the shorter edges have been filled in with a couple of rows of crochet. These rows took me a long time to work out but I think they are the best option.

So here is how far I have got with the blanket.

But what to chose for a border?

Although the blanket has the same number of hexagons as this blanket.

They are just a little smaller which makes a bigger difference to the final size than I imagined so I need to have more rather than less border.

So far the blanket is about thirty-six inches by fifty seven.

Still: no hurry!

Here is a comparison between what I hurriedly created to show my granddaughter and the final centre of the blanket.

Up to now my granddaughter has only seen the motifs pinned onto a sheet in their final arrangement. She did seem happy though even then.