Thursday, March 20, 2008

No pattern necessary.

As much as I love the hunt for new and cool afghan square patterns, sometimes it's fun just to wing it and go freestyle. For today's post, I'm going to show you a few of the blankets I made without any specific pattern.

For starters we have my very first blanket. This was started in the summer of 2005 and finished up that September.

Primarily it consists of alternating solid double crochet squares with granny-style double crochet squares. You can tell just from the picture that it has some imperfections--I hadn't quite gotten the hang of corners yet, to say the least!

Also, when I say "wing it" in this case I truly mean that literally. I have been able to make granny squares and scarf type objects since I was a kid, but hadn't really done any crocheting since junior high or so when I decided to pick it up again. I had picked up some yarn I liked that went with the colors of our house (you can sort of see the bedspread underneath, which is a palm tree motif) and was basically just making squares that I liked until I got bored and started making a different type of square, trying to keep them all at the same size. Tricky, but fun. And technically, the stitch I used in this blanket, it's not quite double crochet, though I didn't realize that until after I had finished this blanket. What I had always thought of as "double" was really more somewhere between half-double and true double, so let's call it "3/4" shall we? As I started to accumulate more squares I did begin to formulate a plan for the overall design, and I truly feel that for a first effort it took shape quite nicely.

More recently, I made a blanket for my manager for Christmas this past year that also didn't have an actual pattern to it.

This one really is a giant granny square. I actually had to start and stop it several times before I settled into this design, which is fairly simple, but came out looking very pretty. It is also extremely soft and cuddly. My manager spends a lot of her time outside of work volunteering with efforts to rescue boxer terriers and she has something like seven dogs. I wanted to make her a blanket that matched them, so that she could cuddle with her puppies and not worry about the blanket getting too messed up (another reason I am so fond of Red Heart).

So there you have my two "patternless" efforts. I know that no project is truly without pattern, but these were made using just basic squares and built up from there.

I hope you have enjoyed. There's still at least two posts of blankets to come and then we'll get into the projects I currently have in the fire.

I wish you all a great week! Take care,

Until next time,
C

2 comments:

Julie said...

I like the large granny square blanket. It is a simple way to make a great addition to the home.

SciFiTVFanGirl said...

Thank you so much! Once I finally settled on what I was going to do for this blanket, it was a joy to make, and I think it turned out really well. I'm glad you like it!