That’s my outside-in granny square. It looks pretty good, doesn’t it?

While in Calgary (and hiding from the rain and cold), I decided to try this on a grand scale. My goal: to make a one-big-granny-square blanket working from the outside-in.

I went to Michaels (did you know that Calgary has at least FIVE Michaels stores? Five. For the record, that is 5 times as many as Toronto has, and we just got ours recently.) and picked up some Bernat Baby Jaquard yarn that had blue and green striping in it.

If you look closely at those last two pictures, you’ll see how I ran out of the blue/green yarn (which should have been my first clue something had gone awry… 3 balls should have been enough for the size of blanket I was aiming for) and I had to buy more yarn. They were out of the blue/green, so I picked up some blue/white and kept going.

*sigh*

That crazy folding going on in the middle? It seems that the angles on my blanket are not 90 degrees like they should have been. They were more like the kind of angles you might find on a hexagon… except that there were only four of them, and not six.

I don’t know why this happened; I followed the same pattern I used on that little red square at the top of this post. Was it the yarn? I don’t know.

The real question here, though, is: how on earth did I get so far into making this before realizing that it just wasn’t laying flat? I was taking pictures during the whole process, which involved laying the thing out on the bed at regular intervals.

The answer can only be: denial.

The up side? Apparently even when suffering from denial, you can end up with a quirky poncho!

Mississauga is usually out there somewhere…

… and there’s supposed to be a lake this way:

And I hate snow (boy, do I ever live in the wrong place!), but it’s ok, because my pop will be cozy:

See?

I’ve posted bottle cozies before, but there’s a difference this time: there’s a real pattern!

Yarn: Bernat Handicrafter Cotton
Hook: 5mm
Size: fits a 710ml Diet Coke bottle

ch3 (counts as a dc)
R1: 11dc into first ch, join (12 dc)
R2: ch3 (counts as dc), dc into same stitch, 2dc in each following stitch, join (24 dc)
R3: ch1, sc in same stitch, sc in next 2 stitches, 2sc in next stitch. *sc in next 3 stitches, 2sc in next stitch* 5 times, join (30 sc)
R4: ch3 (counts as a dc), sc in next stitch, *dc in next stitch, sc in next stitch* repeat all the way around, join (30 stitches)
R5: ch1, sc in same stitch, dc in next stitch, *sc in next stitch, dc in next stitch* repeat all the way around, join (30 stitches)

Repeat R4-R5 as many times as needed to reach desired length. (I did 23 rounds on the tan cozy, and 21 on the pink. The difference is for no other reason than they looked the same size on the subway… Yeah, I dunno… but they both fit the bottle nicely.)

As always, if you try this pattern and find an error, please let me know!