Not Your Granny’s Afghan

Granny squares were one of the first things I crocheted as a child. After making afghans, skirts, sweaters and vests, I started creating multi-coloured granny square hats using leftover lengths of wool. Now, I’ve decided to revisit that hat. My first two have a floral motif and are in shades of green, nature’s neutral.

I really liked a certain pattern, but the silk that I favoured for it was too fine. I thought that, by using a double strand of the silk yarn, I could effectively get a thicker yarn to match the gauge of the hat pattern. Gauge (number of stitches and rows per inch) is important in order for the finished garment to be the correct size.

Margaux of Wet Coast Wools in Vancouver helped me produce two equal-sized balls of yarn from one hank. There were two steps to doing this. First, she used a yarn winder to transform the hank into one large yarn ball or cake. Then she used the yarn winder and a weight scale to divide the large cake into two smaller cakes of equal size. 

The resulting yarn cakes make crocheting or knitting easier because they sit flat on a surface and let you pull yarn neatly from the centre of the cake. For my crochet squares hat, I used two strands of yarn held together to crochet five granny squares, joining them to make up a hat.