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I recently fell down the rabbit hole of crocheted graph blankets. Oh man. If you’ve read my previous posts you may have noticed I mention my dislike of making blankets, probably several times. However, I stumbled upon a Crochet Along (CAL) group that had the most amazing, geeky graph blankets. (It’s Two Hearts Crochet, if you want to check it out. Link HERE!) I immediately put all of them on my to do list. It will probably take me a decade or more to get through them all but I will try it! I can think of a number of people in my life that may end up with them as gifts too. Although, after all the work and yarn that go into them I may not be able to part with them. 

Instead of diving head first into those amazing graphs, I thought I would work up one on my own and try it on a smaller scale first. A friend of mine is due with twin girls in September and wanted to do her nursery colors in lavender and navy blue but also incorporating superheroes. Two of her favorites are Spiderman and Batman (Yes, I know they are in different universes. That was pointed out to me.) I thought I would make a couple of small baby-sized blankets with those characters. 

I didn’t have any luck finding a graph of those characters in the way that I had been envisioning in my head. But I did find a web site that was recommended as a good place to create your own crochet, cross stitch, bead graphs. Stitchfiddle.com. I tried importing an image and having it convert it itself but I wasn’t loving the way the graphs came out so I made up my own (I cite user error and not fault in the site). It wasn’t as difficult as I thought it was going to be but it did take a lot of clicking. 

I wanted to try a couple of the different graph stitches that I had been reading about. The first I tried was the HDC Straight with the Batman graph. It’s pretty simple. For each block on the graph you do 2 HDC stitches across and then turn and do that row again in reverse. So each block on the graph will have 2 rows of 2 HDC each. (Here’s a good tutorial from Two Hearts Crochet!)

Pros of doing the Straight HDC- It’s easy to follow the graph. Just back and forth in the rows. 

Cons of doing the Straight HDC- It’s not exactly square. It will end up being a little taller than it is wide, even when your graph is a square. At least that’s how it worked out for me. 

Overall, it was simple and I liked the outcome (even though I did stop a few rows short at the top so that it wouldn’t be too rectangular.)

The second one I did was a Mini Corner to Corner (C2C). I’ve made C2C blankets before at the suggestion of my SIL. They weren’t as tedious as regular blankets but still took a while. Well, longer than I like anyway. I was worried that if I did a regular C2C that the size would be way different than the other blanket and I wanted them to be closer to the same. I had heard people were doing a Mini C2C so I thought that sounded like it was worth a try. 

In a regular C2C, you use 3 DC in each “block”. For the Mini C2C, I used 2 HDC in each. I like the way the C2C blankets look. They have a neat texture and work well with a graph. So each of the the 2 HDC “blocks” is a block on your graph. 

Pros of doing the Mini C2C- Outcome. They look nice and C2C is easy to do.

Cons of doing the Mini C2C- Since you go corner to corner you have to follow your graph diagonally. This may not be a big deal for some people or for certain graphs but oh man, I could not do it. I ended up having to write out each diagonal row so that I could keep it straight. Once it was written out the graph was easy to follow. It just took the time to do it. 

Overall, it could have been worse. And it really didn’t turn out to be the same size as the other blanket. It was smaller by quite a bit, so I added a big ruffle border to make it more equal. It was an actual square though.  (For the ruffle, I did 4 DC in each stitch around, then another round DC in each of those. I changed to white and did a round of SC.)

I sadly did not think to take more/better photos before I sent these off to their new home but you can get the idea of what they turned out like. 

The graphs that I used are below if you are interested in making one of these yourself. And, of course, you can use any colors you would like. I will eventually work on writing up the line by line corner to corner patterns. They are just quite lengthy and I wanted to get a post up.