Hip to be......rectangle?

In my Creative Space this week... Updating the Granny Square.

The humble, and ever-evolving granny-square. Back in style!

Why even bother to update it?!?

Well, after making so many straight forward, plain, knitted and crocheted, 7"x 9" rectangles with my beginning students for Warm up America! afghans over the years, one of my students decided she wanted to make her block as a granny square, but was confused about how to go about it. We were just not happy at all with adding bands to 2 ends of the squares; it just looked bad.

So, how would you do it? You could add more stitch groups into the center ring, rather than the usual 4, but that only made the center pull wide open. You would still need to hold the center of the ring together between the sides that each had two, or more, stitch groups somehow, or it would end up as a ring, not a rectangle. 

So, how do you keep the same look, but stretch the pattern into a rectangle?

 

Well, after a few trys, I think I came up with a good method of turning a granny square into a granny rectangle, which provides the original effect of the granny square (above), but makes it a rectangle, of any length you like.

What do you think? I think I got it right!

Now, I need to plan the afghans with all these little squares and big rectangles!

Still need to make lots of blue and green squares to add to this bunch of yellow and pink.

 Here is my original afghan plan, before the rectangles were available,

and my original stitch diagram for the starting row of the rectangle, which is very illegible here! 

I'm going to have to find the paper and rewrite the instructions so they are legible; they didn't photograph well.

I'll write a tutorial as soon as I unearth the directions. Now to try a Triangle!

Happy stitching!

Check out the other creative spaces at Kootoyoo!