July Crochet Along Squares

Happy July to everyone!  July came in with a bit of a bang here, as the new home that we’ve been patiently waiting for seems like it’s finally coming together.  I’m having to hustle a little with packing – first we were supposed to move in May, so I packed then.  And then when delays happened, I ended up going through and unpacking all the boxes.  So we’ve been kind of just living half-in, half-out of boxes, and without any kind of organizational system, and two young boys to the mix… well, it’s been kind of a mess!  But we’re just waiting on some finishing details, and it looks like we’ll be moving in the next two weeks.  So that’s a LOT of re-packing to do.  Fortunately, I never bothered to pack any yarn.  No, the yarn will be transported from old home to new not in any moving truck, but loaded in the back of my van, and carefully unloaded by me.  Priorities, right?

Anyway, as with the beginning of any new month are the crochet along squares from the BAMCAL group!  A couple of months back, I decided to cut myself a break from making 12” square to 9”, and I’ve been so happy with the results!  In fact, it’s inspired me to redesign the whole layout of the blanket.  If you recall, this particular afghan is supposed to end up being a Christmas gift for my sister come the end of the year.  Usually, I piece together all the twelve-inch squares in a grid (with my 6” squares grouped together in a four-patch to make another 12” square), and then stitch a border onto that.  This year, with the change from 12” to 9”, I’ve decided to go in a whole different direction:

As you can see, it’s going to be a LOT more fun than the typical grid pattern.  I have the 6” squares intermingled with the 12s and the 9s, and then I thought adding strips of grannies to even out the extra spacing would be perfect.  I later modified the plan even further by changing some of the 3” grannies to 4” and adding a 2” granny strip to that.  Anyway, the result should really be a lot of fun!  I’ve had a whole new level of enthusiasm toward the project since, and I plan on making the coordinating afghan for my mom’s Christmas present the same way.  So I spent a good three solid days making up all the grannies necessary and waving in what felt like a couple thousand ends.  Much better to do that now than to end up doing it a panicked hurry a week before Christmas, anyway!  And now I’ll just keep up with the squares that are selected over the next few months from the BAMCAL group and put the whole thing together.  So I’m pretty excited to see the final result.  

The squares for this month were a lot of fun to make too.  The first square was one of my favorites to make.  It’s called Whimsical Block, and can be found for free here.  I love the way the outline looks like little Christmas lights against the black yarn, like they’re sparkling a bit.  The yarn for all these, by the way, is Caron Simply Soft.

The second block is called Posie Field and is a free Ravelry download that can be found here.  It looks a bit complicated, but the instructions are fairly straightforward, and the square turns out lovely in the end.

And the six-inch squares are SmoothFox’s Charity Square Number 1, a very easy to make granny circle within a square.  I had a lot of fun planning out colors and will definitely make this one again sometime.  The free pattern can be found here.  

Tonight I’m going to put a good show on Netflix and start attaching all these grannies together, and maybe when that’s done I might get this color group ready to move.  I certainly hope that August won’t roll around with me still stuck in between homes!  But no matter what the case, I definitely won’t run out of things to crochet.

~Mellie ★