Babette Blanket: helpful hints 2, sewing together

I like to use a crochet stitch to join my squares, I looked it up on line and found Attic24 has a great tutorial, lots of pictures and a great help. I learned to place my work good sides together and to go through the outside loop of the seam. The results looked great. The only thing is she was joining equal sized granny squares rather than my jigsaw of different sized squares so it took me a while to work out how the Babette went together. 

What I learned...

...it's all about doubling up the corner chains!

At first I treated each corner chain stitch as a seperate stitch, as you do when joining granny squares, but soon found my joins were not going well, I was left with overhang! After counting and recounting my stitches on the outside of the squares and finding I hadn't either missed a stitch or added one in I realised that the corner chains had to be doubled up when joining.

 

So how do you connect multiple small squares to the larger squares?

 

 

First you need to join your smaller squares into one piece. 

 Ideally you have left a tail on your work just over the length of the four sides of the square. This is just enough to join that size square. 

Join two squares starting from the chain at the end of each side and working across (please see below or Attic 24). 

If you are using the tail your work should look like this...

 The tail has is shown here.

 To start push your hook through the corner chain.











Then push the hook through the corner chain of the square to be joined. Wrap the tail over the top of your hook. Pull the tail through the work. You now have a loop in your hook.

The next stitch is a bit fiddly and I couldn't photograph it well, your next stitch you need to go through is the tiny stitch just to the left of the hook in this photo. Wiggle your hook in and through the back square, wrap the tail round as usual and pull through. Keep going until the chain stitch at the other end of this side, join one chain stitch from each square. Pull tail through, Done!

Now to join a larger square to a number of smaller squares you have already joined together.

Again Attic 24 shows how you start in the corner at the chain stitch closest to the side you are joining. To start the join push your hook through the corner chain of each square, wrap joining wool round and pull through. You now have a loop on your hook.

 With a loop of joining wool, dark blue, on your hook push it through both squares you are joining, light blue and beige. Giving you three loops on the hook. 







 


Wrap joining wool round the hook and pull through all three loops. This gives you the next loop of joining wool on your hook. Continue working along the edge remembering to jointhe outside loops.

 Now to join the two smaller squares on one side to one larger on the other. In this example the larger square is the light blue on the right.  

When you reach the end of the smaller beige square do a joining stitch at the top of the last dc as usual.

Now just like a normal join push your hook through the larger bright blue and through the corner chain of the beige sqaure. 







 

Without wrapping your joining wool round go into the first corner chain of the next square to join, dark blue here. You will now have four loops on your hook, from right to left, the joining wool, the larger square and the corner chains from each of the smaller squares. Now wrap the joining wool round your hook and pull through all 4 loops.

Now continue on as before. If you don't double up the corner chains in the joining process your small squares will end up overhanging your larger square.


This method works well, last night I joined my 9th panel onto the main blanket. Not only is this a huge milestone as the blanket is now half way to being complet but I joined one edge made of 4 & 8 rounds squares to an edge of 10, 8, 6, 4 & 2 rounds squares and they matched up perfectly!

  

The Babette Blanket helpful hints!

I'm currently making my second Babette blanket. These amazing creations were first bought to my attention when two friends picked up the pattern from Kathy Merrick. I told them they were mad! A year later I'm on my second giant sized blanket based on her pattern. 

I didn't follow the pattern to the letter. I tend to take the bits I like and search the Internet for alternatives. First what I did follow in Kathy Merrick's pattern was the layout, her 12, 10, 8, 6, 4 and 2 round squares nestle together beautifully. I then kept going making my blankets bigger and bigger until it was big enough to cover a single bed.

 








What I changed, everything else! 

I didn't use the yarn suggested or the colours suggested, or the pattern for each individual square!

The wool I used was from Spotlight, Moda Vera 8ply Australian pure wool 50g balls. It's lovely but I didn't pay full price for any of it, I waited for it to be on special or I had a voucher.

The wool comes in 31 colours, I started with the 15 shown but in the end I used a total of 20 colours in my first blanket, retrospectively WAY too many but every time I went to get extra balls of wool I found another lovely colour. The second blanket I managed to control myself a bit more, I only used 14 colours!

 





For the squares I found a different pattern, http://doyoumindifiknit.typepad.com/do_you_mind_if_i_knit/2009/05/crochetpatterns.html 
This page has amazing step by step instructions with photos to help you make the square. It differs from the Kathy Merrick square as you move out to the next round at the corner of each square rather than in the middle of a side. Not sure why but I think it gives a neater finish. I did a ch2 in each corner as in her pattern but only a ch4 when I started a new round. I also used a dc stitch not a tc... I'm not very good at following instruction!

 
So what did I learn?

I learnt that you can spend longer thinking about which colours to use than actually crocheting! Especially when some of your colours clash. I also found I liked some combinations of row thicknesses compared to others, and ended up undoing a few complete squares that I just didn't like.

I learnt that when you change colour sew in the ends as you go!

 
 
The first blanket I did all the squares and then sewed them together, HUGE mistake. I did end up with some lovely piles of squares and it meant I could sit and work through lots of squares making sure I didn't end up with any the same colours but putting it together was a nightmare.





It took hours of moving squares around to get the colours looking good and then I was faced with the problem of how to keep them in the right position as I sewed them together. With two small children not that easy! I ended up tacking them to a sheet and having them all over my living room floor for ages.


When I did sew the pieces together I did each of the panels separately and then finally sewed them together like a giant wool jigsaw.


  







Second time round I am making the squares as I go, starting with the 12 square in the middle and spiralling out completing a panel at a time and then adding it to the blanket. (As shown in my excel sheet) This is great because I can use the blanket as I'm making it. My little man slept under it when it was about a third of the way through, I'm still working on it and I can throw it over the settee and it looks great.

Sewing up
 
I used the wonderful Attic 24 for instruction on how to join squares. my error was trying to use two different methods. To stop the tiny 2 squares from moving around while on the sheet on my living room floor I quickly joined them by sewing them together. I then diligently crocheted the larger squares together, crocheting in my view gives a much neater join and is very quick to do and undo if needed. The problem came when i tried to add the pre sewn small squares in, as you can see in this photo the join looks different and the wouldn't fit together properly. I had to undo all the sewn seams and redo them with a crochet join.

The ends the ends!! A nightmare!!  

At the end of each square leave a long tail, if you leave about 4x the length of one side you should have enough to join that square to its neighbour. This means you won't have as many ends to sew in at the end. I'm still making the second blanket so I will post some pictures as I go.

And sewing in the ends... I cheated and got my mother in law to do it for me ;)

First post

I'm spending my evenings sewing, crocheting and knitting. Having taught myself to crochet from You Tube I wanted to pass back what I have learnt and the mistakes and successes I have made.

I'm currently crocheting a king size blanket, acrylic because I liked the colours and as a friend said "you won't love it forever so just make it".