A lot of people struggle with the concept of doing Granny’s squares. And the reason for that is the Granny square is actual a true square. I guess the best way to illustrate that is that when you’re doing an edge and you’re coming all the way round. Let’s draw a square and hopefully you can see this. So a square is actually true to nature, it’s actually a square. For a lot of people slip stitching is a very hard thing to get the concept of it especially when you’re doing squares and rectangles. And the reason for it is that the slip stitching appears on one side or the other. What we can do here, we can actually get around that and I don’t know if there’s a technical word but I’m going to call it the never ending squares and rectangles. And the reason for it is that a lot of people don’t know how to slip stitch very good so you end up with a blanket.

So when you’re slip stitching for example, you’re going to go on a complete circle or square like so. And then when you get to where you’ve started, you’re going to slip stitch maybe five chains and then you’re going to go to end start the next one. Then you’re going to get back to it again you’re going to chain up five and then start the next one. So it’s kind of like a TV in a TV in a TV and every time you go around it kind of gets bigger. And you can do this also with rectangles if you want to but again you end up seeing the line on the one corner all the time. I’m not sure if this is just a skill that you can manage to understand or whether it’s just experience.

What I’ve used to because slip stitching is relatively new for me as of last year. When I started teaching here on You Tube is that people want it to understand it. So what I used to do before is that I used to never have to slip stitch because of the way that I’d started the very beginning. And the way that I start the very beginning is that I start at the center point and work my way around. But when I come around to the start again, instead of joining it in making a full square, I end up going a little over it and continuing around. And as soon as you get passed this first round here, then you just keep going. And every time you hit a corner then you keep changing direction. And so end up never with a point that you’re expanding out and so in effect you don’t actually end up with a true square to you. But when it’s so big as in a blanket, a baby’s blanket or maybe a double size, queen size or even some doily, it’s just that you don’t notice that this thing is not a perfect square. And you can do this also with rectangles instead of just starting off as a square. You just go over few chains and then until your work were back.

So today we’re going to concentrate on that and the thing about rectangles that you have to be very careful on. And the thing about it is that I have done rectangle ones like this where it’s been way too long and not wide enough. And the thing about doing any kind of Granny squaring or regular stuff is that it expands the blanket every time you work at it. You’re not only expanding in this side but you’re expanding over here and here and here. So every time you’ve expanding, you’ve actually done four lines to expand your blanket. And so with the actual rectangle, what you need to worry about is that when it looks like the size of a Barbie blanket you should be really judging what the proportion of the blanket is sure lengthwise and widthwise will actually fit your project that you’re working for. And again as I said I end it up with the blanket that wasn’t wide enough but way too long. That’s because the very beginning wasn’t started properly.

So these are called never ending, I’m going to call this never ending squares and rectangles. And we can do this with a number of patterns, as long as that you’re not doing something really cookie. Like where it requires to be counting stitches. This is great for like double crochet, single crochet traditional Granny’s squares, pouch stitching all kinds of different things you can do it in this format. And this will save you so much of the headache of doing that way. And what else can I say about this stuff, very easy to do. I would suggest doing it this way for beginners to get the concept of crochet. This is a little bit complex and if you’re not really skilled with this slip stitching then I would go this way. I’m not sure this route would be sufficient as if you’re going to do a Granny square blanket because you really have to pay attention that you’re squares are of the same size each and every time where this guarantees that because you’re counting out the lines.

I’ve also done stuff where I like every line to be a different color and what we can do is I’m just going to pause this video and I’ll just show you. So this would be an example of a blanket that I have done where there are three separate colors and so basically I wanted a rainbow kind of effect. It’s actually Christmas blankets, so I had red, green and white. So I started the blanket off in the very middle with probably white or something. And when I came around I just finished it here and I stopped and right where I joined here, I added an extra. So I added green and I started the green to come up and around and then I went to that point and I stopped and then I started the red and went around and stopped.

Basically the promise is that when you end up like this is red; you can’t just keep going if this part is not yet done. So you have to like draw, so this is white so you would have to then crochet over top all of these and then come back around. Then what you would do is you go all the way around and you’d have to stop because the red has stopped there. So then you take your green and this will be a corner point. So you turn the corner going all the way across and all the way around. Then you’d have to stop and then you take your red, going all the way around like that. And you end up with the perfect spiraling blanket of many different colors it does twist up your wool a little bit. Once you get the concept then you keep your wools going straight, every time you-anyway so that I’ve just kind of way around so I’m going to take my wool again go all the way around.

You go all the way around to where the red stopped and then you stopped and then you take the next color and keep going all the way around. It’s a really cool concept to do it and you don’t ever have to cut any strings and it’s perfect so it’s a never ending square or rectangle in multi different colors. So we can show you how to do that too.