The Granny Square Blanket - Joining the squares!

I have been making granny squares for this blanket for months now, and it has definitely been a labour of love! I had it set in my head that I wanted to make a 14 x 14 square blanket which would be 168 squares. Which is wrong, clearly my maths skills are atrocious and I worked out 12 x14 instead, which actually wouldn’t be too bad anyway. Or 169 would be a 13×13 square. Either way, a big enough blanket.

I finished my 168th square on Monday night and set them all out to recount them, with hubby’s help, to check I did have enough. The first count reached 176. 176?? We must have done something wrong. Count again and yup, we have 176 squares. Not entirely sure what happened there, must have counted wrong another time, as I now definitely have too many! Oh well, at least it gives a few spares in case the colours are uneven or something.

We decided to lay them all out to choose the order and layout, we wan it to look random but actually be carefully placed so dark and bright colours are spread evenly throughout the blanket. It was fun!

We took photos so I had something to work from but were trying to think of the best way to keep the squares in order and make the joining process as straightforward as possible. So we tied them all up into bundles and labelled them with mini post its. I though that the stickiness of the post its would be enough to stick to themselves, but apparently not, and we had to use a bit of selotape too.

Now comes the actual joining of the squares, and there are lots of methods of joining granny squares. Here is a link to 9 of them! I’ll put links for how to do these methods, and won’t try and explain them myself as I don’t know how to do most of them! I didn’t do the join as you go method, mainly because I didn’t have a colour plan in advance or anything, and because I made quite large squares I didn’t want to add another round of crochet onto each square, which you would have to do for that method to work.

One of my concerns was how the seams would look where the joins are and I want it to look as seamless as possible. So the two methods I thought about were crocheting them together with slip stitch or sewing them together with an invisible seam. The crochet method looks almost invisible from the front but has a visible seam on the back. The invisible method should, in theory, have an invisible seam.

I decided to try the Invisible seam method first, and initially really struggled. I also realised that I wasn’t lining my squares up properly. They all vary a tiny bit in shape and size, I don’t think my crochet is that consistent! But I hope that if I can line them up properly it will even them all out when it is a blanket. So I undid the stitches a bit and tried again, concentrating more on lining up the squares, and the stitch got easier as I went along! I used the same colour yarn as one of the squares and I am quite pleased with how the seams came out.