Teeny tiny squares and Crafternoon colour planning

Over the last week I’ve been making loads of teeny tiny squares. Little granny squares just two rounds deep. I’m not going to make them into anything, but they are going to be worth their way in gold for future Crafternoon Treats crochet and knitting projects that I will do, probably for years to come.

I saw this week on Instagram that Sandra of Cherry Heart is making little blobs – one round granny ‘squares’ and is then joining them with a second colour – a very time intensive project but its looking good. I’ve had an instagram account for a while but I’ve not really done much with it. Another of my New Year’s resolutions was to give it more of a whirl and I’m glad I did! There are lots of IGers who love crochet and it seems like a really nice community. Now that Facebook is just becoming advertise or nothing, I think its worthwhile. On IG you can see what people you follow do without any censorship and you get to comment and interact more naturally.

If you want to connect with me on IG I am crafternoon treats  – @crafternoontreats.

The granny squares are Crafternoon Treats colour planning tool

Ha – got to the point at last. I’ve loved the way that Lucy of Attic24 has used wooden pegs for her colour planning and I did enjoy using my mum’s vintage dolly pegs to plan my hexagon blanket colours. But I have to admit that the process of looping yarn round the pegs is a bit tedious and they take up so much space! I also found it tricky to really see what the colours were going to look like next to each other as plain yarn doesn’t really give you the full story.

So, starting with my collection of Stylecraft Special DK (because that’s what I have most of), I’ve started to create a colour library. Actually I only lack 7 of the 60 Stylecraft DK colours (how sad is that!) and I’ve discovered that there is some potential in their baby range if you need another shade of blue.

The little squares are really good for planning the sequence of a project in progress. I wish I had had them when I did my cosy stripe blanket – these are the colours that I used for that, laid out in my granny squares.

I did my own sequence for this project, although I used all of Lucy’s cosy colours – these are the 15 on the top three rows. The bottom 7 are my additions and I did them in my own order. You can see my finished cosy stripe blanket here.

So, now I have all my squares done, how best to use them?

Having a lovely colour jumble was clearly not the answer, even if it did look good in a heart shape! Going soft now after seeing all the stuff appearing for Valentine’s day. And, sidetracking for a moment, yesterday I noticed that the supermarket I called into (which shall be nameless) had its leftover Christmas snacks for sale next to a display of Easter eggs and chocolate chickens. FFS!!

Anyway, this jumble of lovely squares is squishy and lovely, but it needed to be tamed. So I armed myself with some supplies that I had in for a bookbinding project… I used some book clips, an awl and a pencil and some card discs that I cut with my Sizzix Bigshot. First time I had used it in ages and it reminded me that I need to get back into papercrafting!

I am pretty good at recognising Stylecraft DK because I have used it a lot. Its cheap but not at all nasty and comes it such lovely colours! I wanted to bind 5 squares together with a little label so that I would know instantly what colours I had.

It took a while…

But then I was finished…

For Christmas, I had bought my daughter a large Kilner jar (she is in Boston this year and in the US they are Mason Jars) and I thought this would be a great way to store these beauties, complete with their tagging and labelling system. So here is the Crafternoon Treats colour planning filing system!

These little squares can be easily accessed and I can use them in LOADS of colour planning projects. My next job is to do the same for the other different brands of yarn that I have. I may get really serious and do a spread sheet of each colour and type of yarn and list how much I have – then the information for future projects is all at my fingertips and no need to go ruffling through the boxes under the bed. YET AGAIN!!!!!