The craft club is at the point of stitching up all of our squares. Pictured is one of two blankets we have almost completed. Considering that about half of our members just learned to crochet a few months ago, I’m very impressed with our progress.

It was a tad tricky slip stitching all of the squares together because everyone tends to have a different gauge, but crochet is so forgiving that we managed to make it work. We should finish up these two at our next meeting, and we have a third in the works. I have made three myself and have a fourth one in progress, so we should have a fair amount of items to donate to Healthy Start.

Of course, there were issues as we worked on these. We have a few weird squares that are way larger than 10 inches or just not exactly square, so those will be stitched together to make blankets for a local animal shelter since the dogs and cats won’t mind if there are a few boo-boos in their blankets. For squares that somehow shrank and ended up smaller than 10 inches, I just added a trim around them to make them a little larger. Tails were another issue. I kept having to remind members to leave at least a six inch tail and not to knot.

Some of the good points of making these squares was that it allowed each member to have a small project to work on, and with the squares, they learned three different stitches: chain, single crochet, and double crochet. When we started putting them together, they learned how to slip stitch. Since these are all foundational stitches, they are in pretty good shape to move on to something like hats where they will have to work in the round.