A teenage blanket

Now this blanket was made by my mother when she was a bit older - about 14 or 15 years old. By this time, she had realized that it is so much easier to make one big square, rather than first crocheting lots of little ones, crocheting edges on them and finally assembling the whole thing. Her first blanket was 8 x 15 squares, so that makes four yarn-ends per square (if we count the black edge), a total of 480 ends to weave in!! And after that, she had to sew them all together, which must also have made a few more ends. By my count, this new blanket would have produced about 60 yarn ends...

So yes, as a teenager, she chose the easier method of one big square, elongated with extra bands of color at either end to make it rectangular. Unfortunately, this large piece of knitting was rather more difficult to carry around than the small squares had been, so she did most of the work on this blanket at home. So if you decide to start making a blanket, it might be worth considering that if you are a sociable knitter, you might have to choose the more cumbersome (but certainly no less charming) method of the small granny squares!

As for colors, this time, she had some larger batches of left-over yarn from a blanket which my grandmother had made some time previously. This blanket (which I will be showing you soon) was made as a black background with small yellow and orange squares dotted around. This meant that there was quite a lot of yellow and orange for my mother's blanket, which she used for the outer, and thus longer rounds. In the center, she used small scraps of yarn, which were more suitable for the short rounds. As you can see, though, she always used the scraps up completely so that some rounds changed color halfway.