Tuesday Tutorial 09.04.2013

This week, I thought I would tell you how I made my Squares in Squares Blanket. As a reminder to everyone, this is what the finished article looked like.

As usual, I will assume everybody know how to do Tunisian Crochet and has read my previous tutorials, especially the short rows square.

I've kinda put off telling people how I made this because dome aspects are a little difficult to describe, but I will do my best.

The first thing I did was to make a short rows square. This was so that the centre square had the same look as the triangles that surrounded it.

For the first triangle I joined the yarn at a corner and made 2 chain. The first forward pass I picked up a stitch in the second chain from the hook and linked to the first row on the centre square (2 loops on hook), then did the reverse pass as normal. The next row I picked up a stitch before the next bar then tss in the next stitch and linked to the next row of the centre square (3 loops on hook) the did a normal reverse pass. I repeated the last row until I got to the centre of the side of the centre square, then I started to reduce the number of stitches by tss2tog at the start of each row. Slip stitch into the corner, 2ch and make the second triangle in the same manner as the first. Repeat again for the 3rd and 4th triangles and slip stitch into the starting corner and break off yarn.

This is where it starts getting tricky. Anybody that knows math really well will know that each square needs to increase by a factor of 1.41428 (square root of 2) in order to stay flat. For this project I thought that 1.5 would be close enough.

The next set of triangles was started in much the same way as the first, attach the yarn at the corner, make 2 chain, pick up stitch in second chain from hook, link to the centre row (that's where the corner is) an do the reverse pass as normal. The next row, increase one stitch, tss in the next, link to the next row, reverse pass as normal, is the same as on the first set of triangles. The third row differs in that it links to the same row as the previous row. This is how the triangles end up getting bigger, every 3rd row links to the same row as the previous. I continued increasing one stitch per row until I got to the centre (the corner of the first square) before starting to decrease each row. I only put one row in to the centre row no mater where it fitted into the sequence. I continued with the remaining triangles in the same manner.

The border used the same math to increase the number of rows but the number of stitches remained constant.

Those of you that are observant will notice that the blanket doesn't actually sit flat. This is because each new set of triangle actually had too many rows. 1.5 (3/2) simply doesn't equal 1.41428.

If I were to make this again there are several things I would change. For starters I would make the centre square bigger. I originally intended to only use 6 colours plus the border but the blanket wasn't big enough at the point so I had to add a couple more. Increasing the size of the centre square to about 15cm (6") would have produced a better result. The second thing I would do is not increase 3 rows for 2. I think 7 rows for 5 (1 row into the first, 2 rows into the second, 1 row into each of the next 2 and 2 rows into the 5th) would have been much better (7/5 = 1.4 which is closer to 1.41428 than is 1.5).

I hope I've explained this clear enough, but if I haven't and you want something clarified, drop me an email (link is in my profile) and I'll try to clear things up.

Richard.