Granny Square Blocking Station

Hello everyone!

I'd like to start this post by thanking ALL OF YOU! You've been so very kind and showing us so much love after our announcement of being engaged!
It really spiked the already insanely happy state we were in! To know that so many of you are so happy for us is just the cherry on the cake!
In case you haven't seen our video, why don't you click here to see what I'm talking about ;-)

Now on to the thing many of you have been asking about. My Granny Square Blocking Station!!!.
Say what?! Yes, here at Boys & Bunting we block our Granny Squares!

Now when making a blanket made out of granny squares, blocking is often not really crucial, as the squares will pretty much 'auto-block' when they're joined together.
So why come up with a blocking station you might ask? Well, being crafty is not always about things you need, but more about things you like. I like to block the squares for the blanket we're working on because it makes the piles so very very neat and makes all the squares look exactly the same! It makes it easier to lay them out and organise the colour layout of the blanket.

It also happened because when we started making these squares, Matt's tension turned out to be a lot looser than mine which resulted in bigger squares. I went up a hook size, and adjusted my tension as much as I could but my squares were still a little smaller. The blocking station totally fixed that issue.

So what's the big deal? IS there really much difference after blocking? Well, it's not a HUGE difference, but your granny squares are definitely square afterwards! Here you can see the difference:

So far we've only dry blocked our squares. We put them on our GSBS (granny square blocking station) and let them sit there overnight, or as long as you want. When we take them off, they're blocked. This works because it's cotton and cotton tends to change shape quite easily. When using wool you might want to spray your squares with some cold water as you put them on the GSBS. We haven't tried blocking acrylic ones yet, but I'm pretty sure the GSBS will do the trick as well!

So how does one make this "Granny Square Blocking Station"?
Well, it really is very very easy. Now you might think to yourselves: "well, easy for you maybe". No, not just easy for me, easy for everyone. I have pretty much never in my life held a drill or worked with wood. Matt's usually the done doing stuff around the house. So if I can do it, you can too!
Let's get on with the instructions:

How to make your own Granny Square Blocking Station

Materials

I went to the DIY store to buy some wood, some dowel, a paint brush and a little saw (to cut the dowel). At the wood section they had a sawing service where they also sold left over cuts of wood. One of these boards turned out to be perfect, it only needed to be sawed in half to get 2 perfect squares (I only needed 1). You could however also use wooden chopping board, or any piece of wood that is thick enough. I'd say around 2.5 cm (just under an inch) since it needs to hold the dowel steadily.

The pieces of dowel were 5 mm wide and felt quite strong. I needed enough dowel to make 9 pieces of 20 cm each. Mine were 1 meter each, so I needed 2.

We still had some paint at home from when Matt upcycled a chair he found on the street. A lovely and bright aqua-turquoise color! It totally reminds me of the Caribbean.

Preparation

I sanded the ends of the dowel to make them nice and smooth, i also sanded the entire wooden board, especially the edges.
I then measured my granny squares, which were just under 8 cm. I decided to go with 8 cm so they would stretch a little bit.

Using a ruler I found the center of my square board (I drew 2 diagonal lines across the board) and drew the first marking there. Then I drew marks 8 cm to the left, right, top and bottom of that mark. I then added the last 4 markings in the corners, obviously always keeping the 8 cm distance from the other marks. If my lines and markings look messy on the pictures, it's because I rushed this project so badly! The thing was finished within 40 minutes. It's still pretty accurate though ;-)

Drilling

Now on to the drilling! I used a 5 mm drill since I was using 5 mm dowel. The drill is as cheap as it comes, as it's an Ikea one that works with a battery. It drills so slowly that I was lucky that the wood wasn't very hard, since even with a full battery, I had to push on the drill as hard as I could to even get through the wood. Before drilling, you need to to know how deep you can drill. The easiest thing to do is to hold the drill end against the side of your piece of wood to see how far you can go without going through the wood. I drilled about 1.5 cm in leaving 1 cm "undrilled". You can mark your drill by adding a thin piece of colourful tape on your drill at the point where you should stop. This way you will never drill deeper than you should!

Now drill those 9 holes! Make sure you hold your drill as straight as you can, since you don't want the pieces of dowel to be crooked afterwards!
After you're done drilling, check if your pieces of dowel fit inside the holes. It should be a very tight fit, but if it really won't go in, sand one end of the dowel down a little bit more until it fits. I didn't need to do this. It was very very snug!

Finishing

You can leave your blocking board as is, but I decided to give it a nice coat of paint! Like I said before, I chose this beautiful fresh color which is a paint and varnish in one, with very high coverage and also very quick drying. When I was done painting, it was pretty much dry already. I painted the entire board with the dowel in place. I was scared the paint would fill the holes too much and the dowel wouldn't fit inside anymore. I also didn't plan on taking the dowel out since it's not meant to be an adjustable blocking station, so I was fine with the paint gluing the dowel in place. I didn't do a great job painting the sides of the board, and didn't bother with the bottom as well. But I'm very happy with the outcome.

I didn't paint Poppy! She just happened to wear a matching outfit!

I hope my instructions were clear enough so that you TOO can make a Granny Square Blocking Station! If you do end up making one, please tag us on Instagram with @boysandbunting and #boysandbunting so that we can see your work!

If you have any questions, send us a message either through the blog or through our Facebook Page

Have a lovely weekend everyone!!!

xxx

In Bed With Boys & Bunting: Episode 4

Hello Lovelies!
We do hope you are all having a marvellous start to May?
So happy that it's starting to brighten up and more often than not the sun has got his hat on!
We're back with another "In Bed With Boys & Bunting!!"
So go grab your current project, a massive mug of tea and join us as we natter away for the next half an hour or so!

Some Links and Info from Episode 4

Matt finished off his turquoise baby blanket. What a "life saver" blocking is!!!
He's really happy with how it turned out and over the next weeks will (hopefully be able to) figure out a pattern for this cute little blanket.
For those of you that are interested and may have missed the post, here's Matt's post with all of the information about the blanket.

Our current W.I.P!
We are working on this blanket together and making tons and tons of cotton squares to join together.
We haven't quite decided how we are going to join them yet, so any ideas would be greatly appreciated?
We are very excited with how this blanket is coming along, It's so nice to be working on a project together!

Dennis' spot of D.I.Y has produced a rather fun and functional little gizmo for blocking our Granny Squares. It's perfect for blocking many squares at once and doubles up as an easy way to store the squares, until we join them.
Dennis will write up the details of how he made his "Granny Square blocking device" over the next days, so that you to can join the perfectly formed Granny Square revolution!!

You may have noticed that the "Granny Square blocking thingy" is the same colour as the chair in our bedroom. That's because Dennis used the left over paint from this chairs upcycle. To read all about the transformation of our beloved bedroom chair, you can follow the link here.

Finally Dennis asked the "BIG" question and Matt said a whopping great "YES!"
I guess we'd better get crocheting....perhaps something like this crocheted wedding bouquet that we made for our friends wedding? Or a little ring carrying harness for Poppy to wear? Oh the possibilities are endless!!! :-)

We hope that you enjoyed our fourth instalment of "In Bed with Boys and Bunting"?! If you have questions that you would like to see featured in future episodes then simply send us a quick note.
Also if you like what you're seeing in our Youtube videos, don't forget to subscribe. This way you'll be notified when we next upload a vlog episode or tutorial.

Unitl next time...

Turquoise Baby Blanket

Hello there lovelies!
I do hope you are all well?

It's been a little while since I sat down and wrote an actual blog post. Sure, we've been doing the competition and continuing our vlog series (In Bed With Boys and Bunting) but I haven't written a "regular" post in a little while. Well, that's about to change as I have a lovely little project to blog about today...

You may remember that last month I shared with you some rather gorgeous wool that I picked up from a local shop:

Now the second I saw this wool, I had to have it. The colours were gorgeous and the texture and squishiness of the natural wool was to die for. The colour was the main temptation for me, but the thought of that luxurious yarn running through my fingers as I hooked it into something, were too much to resist.
The yarn is Peer Gynt, from a Norwegian company Sandnes Garn. It's some gorgeous yarn, a superwash wool and comes in some AMAZING shades!!!

So I bought the yarn, not really knowing what I was going to make.

After some thought, I went home and got working on a baby blanket.

I thought that the bright turquoise would be a great choice for a baby, it was fun and bold. I also thought that the lighter turquoise and the grey would add some nice accents to the blanket, breaking up the colour a little.

I got to work on the blanket, making up the pattern as I went along.

I used a stitch that I had used on a previous baby blanket (tiramisu baby blanket) which consisted of working 2sc in a stitch, skip the next stitch and repeat.
I liked this sc stitch pattern, it was simple but added a variation to the look of just doing rows and rows of plain single crochet's.

Once I had worked a block using this single crochet pattern, I added some regular single crochet rows, using my other colours. This added a nice contrast to both the stitch pattern and the colour of the blanket.

I was very pleased with how bright and striking the blanket was looking. I felt that it was looking pretty modern.
The simple colour blocks, along with combinations of the bright colours next to the contrasting cooler grey, seems to be quite popular at the moment.

Once I was done with my contrasting "stripey bit", I continued to crochet with the main colour until I felt that the blanket was large enough.
It took me a little while as the single crochets were slow work, but they were very pretty and perfect for a baby blanket.

Once I was satisfied with the size of the blanket. I added some rounds of sc using a combination of the colours to make the framing border.

As I was working the border section I noticed that my work was starting to warp!
The warping was coming from the amount of sc's I was performing into the side of the blanket, it was maybe a few to many, which meant that my work wasn't lying flat.
I debated about redoing the border?
Dennis ensured me that it would probably be fixed with a good blocking, once the blanket was complete.

I persevered with the blanket finishing the border with a nice classic round of shells.

I wish I had a picture of how the blanket was looking before I blocked it. It wasn't a pretty sight!
It was so insanely wrinkly, I really didnt think blocking was going to be able to sort this out.

I gave the blocking a go though.
Simply soaking the blanket in warm water and pinning it out on one of our sofa cushions. I then left it to dry for a day or two, to make sure that it had really set in the shape that I wanted.

It certainly did the trick as this was how the blanket turned out...

The corners are not completely square, again probably due to a few too many stitches in the row. The blanket is lying flat though, and that was really the main thing for me.

I'm really very pleased with how the blanket turned out, especially as there were moments when I thought that the end result were going to be a complete mess.
I love how the colours look quite modern, yet the shell edging (especially) adds a very classic feel to the blanket.

I need to do a little tweaking of why the pattern didn't quite work up to plan. Once I've done that, I'll be sure to share my making method with you all, so you can give making this blanket a go if you fancy?!

Wishing you all a lovely weekend!

xxx

Did You Win Our GIVEAWAY?!

Hello Lovelies!!!

We do hope you have all had a lovely week?
We've had a nice week away spent in Lindau, on the Bodensee. A jolly nice break from the normal rut of life.
What better way to end our lovely week than to be sharing the results of our GIVEAWAY with you all.

We had over 150 of you enter the "giveaway" and could not believe that people from every nook and cranny of the planet are reading our blog. It's really rather lovely to know that we are connecting with people all over the world!!

So as for the giveaway, we had a rather nice selection of craft related goodies up for grabs:

• A fabulous set of crochet hooks, the most comfortable we've used in a while!
• A collection of lovely Rico Creative Cotton, 10 shades in total
• A handmade Boys & Bunting Instagram Pin Cushion
• 2 Boys & Bunting Handmade Soaps
• Knit pro crochet hook, the ideal size to use with the Creative Cotton
• Crochet Stitch Encyclopedia
• A handy (and pretty cool) project/stash bag

So all you had to do to be in with a chance of winning these awesome prizes was sign up to either our blog or one of our social media platforms (Facebook, Instagram, Youtube or the Blog) , making sure to leave your name and location.
Once that was all done we entered your details into our raffle.

Here's all of the names in our raffle pot, with one lucky winner waiting to be picked!

In true Boys & Bunting style, we did the raffle on the bed, making sure to film us picking the winner!
To find out if you're the lucky winner, watch the video below as we choose our winner:

Congratulations to the winner!!
We hope that you enjoy your new gifts and that each and every one of you enjoyed entering this fun giveaway!
I'm sure we will have another giveaway in the future, so watch this space!!

Enjoy the rest of your weekend!