Granny Squares

Another one of this month's finishes.

Maybe you remember seeing this magazine out on the shelves last year?

It is the October 2010 issue.  I picked it up and was taken with the cover quilt.  The story that the designer, Lissa Alexander, provided was that one of her coworkers was going to teach a crochet class, but it couldn't happen right away, so while she waited to learn to crochet, she decided to quilt a granny squares afghan.

This design appealed to me for a number of reasons.  First, my great grandmother crocheted and made granny squares, so it immediately reminded me of her.  While I do know how to knit, I was never able to crochet more than the chain stitch, and yarn is just not my medium.  I love yarn and all the textures and fibers, but it does not love me.  Second, I practically never meet a scrap quilt that I don't like.  And finally, I loved how in constructing this quilt, the value of the fabric was altered in different places in the different blocks to achieve a wide variety.  It was so much fun!

Here is a good example.  I loved doing the outer most fabric of the granny square in an fabric almost matching my background, brown fabric, making some of the squares appear smaller.  I really remember that look in the old granny squares afghans.

Here is the whole thing spread out on my living room floor. (I just love having the balcony above for photographing large quilts!)  I precut all the pieces I needed from the brown (which is a Basic Grey grungy brown--since I scrapbook, I love having fabric that matches the paper I really like to use.)  But when it came to construction, I selected and cut the fabrics for each granny square and then sewed the block one at a time instead of chainsewing several blocks at once.  I will admit that I sort of cheated and used fabrics in similar color and value to what the designer chose for each block, but not always.  It was lots of fun to pull fabrics and make a completely different-looking block each time.  But you should have seen my quilting room--fabric containers and fabrics all over the floor!

The one aspect of the pattern that was a bit tricky--this pieced inner border.  It was all bias, so stitching it between two brown strips was challenging.  It required pinning and lots of careful sewing!  I must have done alright, though, because it lays flat and has the same number of segments on all four sides!

Aloha,
JoAnne