Granny Square Sampler Afghan – Week 16

This week Blair at Wise Craft had us start joining our squares for the Granny Square Sampler Afghan Project. At first I was going to wait and join when I had enough square for the size blanket I wanted, but when I saw we were only putting together a center rectangle I decided to move ahead.

As you can see I still have a few squares left to join and then I’m going to put a red and blue stripe all the way around. My center square is a lot more of a definite pattern than I think this afghan was meant to have, but I felt like with all the crazy squares having a pattern in the middle kind of gave your eye a place to rest. This is a theory Susi and I have discussed a lot, especially when it comes to quilts. Sometimes they can be so busy your eye doesn’t have a place to rest and take it all in. My rectangle won’t be the exact 20″ x 30″ we were supposed to shoot for, it’ll be a little longer and a little thinner, but I don’t think it’ll matter that much.

As for the technique of joining everything together, we are doing the join as you go method. If I had realized it was going to put an extra row on every square I might not have ended most of mine in white. It means my afghan is going to have quite a bit of white, but I’m actually ok with that as I see it come together. It is a little tricky joining all these different squares together and I’ve been doing quite a bit of math to figure out how to fit things in without having to add to many extra fill in rows. The middle of this rectangle was ripped out three times just trying to get it right.I just keep reminding myself this is a learning piece and it is not meant to be perfect.