Granny square blanket, meet my couch

It's high time I shared with you my finished granny square blanket.  I think this project took me a good 18 months to complete and in doing so it completely missed its intended purpose of being used in little boy's cot this winter.  In various stages of completion it has sat in a lump in the lounge room or hung in a bag from my wardrobe handle, I even faithfully dragged it around to a weekly knitting group I was attending last year (which was mostly some toddler chasing, lots of chatting and a little bit of crochet), it just would. not. end.  But now it is done and gracing my couch, albeit a little small to be anything more than a lap blanket.  C'est la vie, blanket, c'est la vie.

It's made from the relatively cheap Moda Vera wool from Spotlight, blue and white only, 20 squares all up. The squares themselves are nine rows each, either six rows of white, two of blue and one of white, or five of blue, two white, one blue and another white (sorry for the non-technical crochet speak there, I'm sure there's a more elegant way of describing that somehow). I sewed the squares together in five rows of four to make the blanket.

But oh no, it couldn't stop there, could it?  It needed a border, where to start?  I had been methodically making treble stitches around and around to make the blanket squares without being able to understand any other crochet stitch but then I looked up some online tutorials for making borders on blankets and a curious thing happened to me - I started to understand crochet. It just clicked and I fast made a 'flat border cluster' row from a tutorial at Handmade Wardrobe, then did a row of blue treble stitches, another of white and finally made a scalloped edge following instructions from Attic 24.  Ta-da!

After all the time it took me and the moments of hating how slow my progress was on this blanket in the end I was almost sad I had finished it.  Nothing like finishing on a high.

And nothing like getting snuggly with little person toes.

I think my days of playing around with wool are numbered for the rest of the year.  Spring just sprung here in Brisbane and for the first time in ages I went fabric shopping and came away with enough goodness to make three new garments for myself - almost time for 'hello sewing machine'.