Patchwork Blanket {piecing it together}

Hello. How's your summer been? Mine's been busy, but nice.

I'm still working on my crochet patchwork blanket. Well, when I say working on, I actually just mean that it's sitting in a basket, unfinished. I'm hoping to get it finished by the time the baby arrives (due beginning of December), but if not, that's fine too.

I've had some questions about how I assembled my blanket, as I haven't followed a pattern. So, here I am, doing a blog post on it.

So, I first made a load of squares in different sizes, always sticking to the same size crochet hook and equal numbers of rows/rounds. When finishing each square, I left a nice long tail, because I knew that I would use these later to attach the squares to one another.

The edges of the squares curled a bit like these ones. To flatten them out, I pinned them to a notice board and sprayed them with water, then left them to dry, which did the trick.

Once I had a few squares to play with, I arranged them on a flat surface until I was happy with the arrangement. Then, out with the safety pins and I pinned them to one another, making sure the backs of the squares were all facing the back of the blanket.

The time then came to sew the squares together. As I said in a previous post, I wanted the stitching to be hidden but, as each square was finished with a different colour (unlike my laptop rug, where I could just sew them together with matching cream yarn), there was no neutral colour for me to choose. So, I decided to leave the super-long tails when finishing a square so that each square would be attached using its own colour. Does that make sense?

Here's an example for you. In this photo, the super long tail of the green square was used to join both the blue square and the orange square, with some yarn left at the end of the tail to join whichever colour I may put along the other side of the green.

I laid out what I had so far to see which colours I wanted more of and what sizes to make next.

I then made a sort of a plan (yes, the scribbles below are a plan) of how many 'rounds' each new square needed to have, along with which colours I would be using for each square.

Translation for the plan on the top right of the paper:
6 rounds: orange for the first 3 rounds, followed by 1 round of denim and 2 rounds of navy.

As I completed each square, I crossed it off the list.

I then went back to piecing them together and making another plan for what squares to make next.

This is what I have so far:

Still unfinished but rather large. The next step for me is to make the right sized squares to even it out. Once that's done, I'll do a border around the whole thing. The bit I'm dreading is sewing all of the tails in. I feel as though there's some big secret on how to do it without them unraveling which I have completely missed. If you know, please fill me in.

This blog post is a lot lot longer than I was anticipating. Well done for sticking with me. Now massage your eyeballs as a reward. Be sure to keep your eyelids closed.

If this blog post has helped you out with your blanket in any way, leave a comment. That would make me feel good.