The legendary Granny square is one of the first things a burgeoning "hooker" usually learns to make. It's a simple enough pattern -- a sequence of double crochets and chain stitches worked, counterintuitively, in rounds until the square reaches the desired size. More advanced hookers may blow off Granny as too basic or too unsophisticated, but I'm a firm believer that Granny is what you make of her.
For instance, my mother once made a blanket for one of my childhood dolls out of some leftover yarn by simply making a large Granny square that was maybe two feet by two feet. It was a perfect doll-sized blanket and "Cindy" and I never went anywhere without it. I also had a couple of sweater-vest/pullover thingies as a kid that were basically two Granny squares sewn together with little cap-sleeves attached.
As for me, I spent the holiday weekend crocheting about a dozen Granny square dish cloths in coordinating colors to put up for sale at
The Sunny Attic. I found I could churn one out in under an hour, even if I included a final row of single crochets as a border. (I had ridiculous quantities of lovely cotton yarn to use up, so I went to town, as you can see from the photo below):
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| Variegated and self-striping and solid, oh my! | |
It was great fun choosing different color combinations to come up with coordinating sets of dish cloths, and, as always, I loved the instant gratification. I'm in the midst of a pieced afghan right now that involves many, many hexagonal Granny squares (Granny hexagons?) but despite the fact that that one's going to take me a while, it's proving to be a wonderfully portable project. I can throw two or three balls of yarn in my bag and work on the component hexagons pretty much anywhere. And that's the intrinsic beauty of Granny, in my opinion: the versatility. If you stop at one, you've got a nice little dish cloth or baby-doll blanket, but if you keep making them, you can put them together into something bigger. So don't count Granny out!
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