A skein of sock yarn often makes a pair of socks with enough left over to make something…but not another pair of socks. Following the example of my mom, I began making small squares with the leftovers. She makes all her squares the same size. Whenever one of her many family, friends, or slight acquaintances has a baby, she can piece together a blanket in a relatively short amount of time. I get bored making squares. I don’t have such a wide variety of people on whom I can bestow a blanket. I get to play a bit more with my sock yarn.

I use three shapes: small square, big square and oblong. The small square and oblong are knit from one end to the other. The big squares start in the middle and grow out.

I do a basket weave design on the small squares. It keeps my attention engaged, but just barely. I crochet a ring around all the squares to make joining them easier.

The oblongs have as many stitches as the small squares, which means they match in width. They are a more complex pattern, but still easy enough to knit and keep up with an audio book or a movie. The oblongs are a couple of inches longer than the small squares. I knit the large squares in the round until they match the long edges of the oblongs. By keeping the first oblong nearby, I don’t have to count rows but just compare the new piece until it matches.

I ran out of the blue-green-gray yarn and so made the last of the smalls with a color of equal intensity as the gray/red oblongs. I bet you didn’t even notice that color change in one of the border squares! By using so many different colors, I built myself a challenge as to how to create a whole out of the parts. I took some of the orange and made crochet borders around some of the smalls and the light colored oblongs. I took some of the light colored yarn to border some other smalls and the large squares. Everything still seemed unconnected, so I bordered everything in a dark color. When I laid out the squares to start joining them, the blanket looked too dark and bleah for a baby. I went in hunt for more yarn. Nothing in my stash did what I needed.

The yarn I found knits into stripes when made into socks.

The neon green version turned out to have enough blues, grays and pink to go with the array of colors in my squares.

A row of single crochets around all the pieces in the new yarn helped integrate them. I joined them with a slip stitch/chain stitch combo, skipping about three single crochets between slips. It makes that zig zag pattern.

The border consists of another round of chain stitches, two rounds of single crochets in the orange (which lasted to the end with about six inches to spare…whew!) and a row of half double crochets in the dark color. Then a final border of a crab stitch in the new neon yarn. The new mom’s comment was that the blanket was thin, supple, soft and warm. She loved the design and colors. Her baby loves being wrapped in it. Because it is sock yarn, it can be tossed in the washer and dryer and won’t shrink. The fibers run the gamut from cotton to silk to merino, but they could be combined into one blanket due to being designed to make socks. My homespun is not as easy care so I am more than happy to spend money on sock yarn!

April 21st and another inch of snow. Warm blanket time for a while yet here in Big Woods country.