circles & squares afghan

Okay, so this isn't *the* rainbow afghan, but I did use a similar border. I wanted to make another granny square blanket but wanted it to be a little more random that usual and to make it with solid colored blocks. It is in my nature to want to plan out a color scheme and have some kind of order to it, but I threw caution to the wind this time. Well, not really. I tried, but it was more like I struggled to figure out which block would seem randomly placed to the next as I went. And then, as you can see, I decided that for every two diagonal rows of solid squares there would be a row of circles-inside-squares. I used these three patterns:

-Grandala Square by Crochet with Raymond**
-Granny with a Twist from 200 Crochet Blocks by Jan Eaton (seriously, buy this book!)
-Regular old granny squares (<---two awesome tutorials from CraftStylish and the purl bee)

All of the blocks used yarns I had in my stash. I bordered each circle or square with Caron Simply Soft in "heathered gray." I have read that many people do not like to crochet with this yarn, but I haven't had any problems. I really love this gray because it looks almost silver. Maybe the splitting issues arise when using a smaller hook. For this afghan, I used a size J hook (and not just any hook, it was one of the fancy Clover ones I got for my birthday!) for everything but the very last row of the border. I worked that with an H hook. The squares are joined this super easy way with a round of the gray, and then I did one more round of gray around the whole thing. The border was stitched in half-double crochet in purple, blue, green, yellow, orange, and pink. I added a simple picot stitch in gray to finish it off. I still feel kind of weird about the random colors, and I can't stop staring at that reddish block, but the nice orderly border makes me feel warm and safe. Here is the link to my project on Ravelry. Are you on Ravelry? Let's be friends!

As soon as I get a semi-decent picture of *the* rainbow afghan, I'll blog about it. Meanwhile, here are some in-progress pictures of this one:

**Crochet with Raymond is an awesome blog I discovered while trying to find patterns for this project for squares with a traditional granny square edge but with a circle in the center. Check it out!