Beautiful Blogger Blanket 2013: My Squares

Hey there!

Do you remember? In December I had already shown you a little teaser of the squares I've made for The Beautiful Blogger Blanket 2013, a great project organized by Jill over at Stocki.

I didn't want to spoil the surprise for Jill, so I had only shown you a little glimpse of my squares so far...:

... although I have to admit that I was impatient enough to use a full shot of one of the squares as profile pic for my new Facebook page. Have you noticed? :)

Today, Jill has published the pictures of my squares in her post "Greetings from K-town" - I'm really flattered by her kind words about my blog - thank you so much, Jill!

So, here are the pictures of my squares before I had sent them to the UK:

The only requirement for the squares (other than their shape of course) was that they have to be made with 100% cotton dk yarn, and so I've used Rico Essentials Cotton DK to make mine. I've got this suggestion from Barbina, the happy winner of last year's stunning blanket, so maybe it's a lucky yarn, and I might win this year ;)

The pattern might look familiar to many of you, because I've used the popular African Flower Hexagon as inspiration for my squares. I've only found out recently that the credit for this Hexagon goes to Lounette Fourie and Anita Rossouw who have published this pattern in the South African Sarie Magazine. There's a great tutorial for making these hexagons on Heidi Bear's blog, and that's where I had first seen them a long time ago.

The only problem I always had with the African Flower Hexagons is their shape: when you join them to a blanket, you always have an uneven border. And nevermind how clever the solutions are, that people come up with to solve this problem (like half-hexagons), they're still just solutions to a problem that wouldn't exist in the first place, if the motif was... well, a square! :)

There are already some versions of African Flower Squares out there in the www (just ask google), but somehow I wanted to try to "square the hex" myself, and this is what I came up with:

I hope you all like my version of the African Flower Square, because I have already taken step-by-step pictures for a tutorial I want to share with you, soon (if you're interested). I just need to write down the instructions to the pictures, and I hope I'll manage it til the week-end!

Have a great week everyone and thanks for stopping by in k-town tonight!