 Hi everyone, Tasha with Start at School Crochet. Welcome to part two of the Heart's Baby Blanket Cal. Please subscribe now if you haven't already and check out part one. In today's tutorial, we're going to go over joining these beautiful squares and also steam blocking. This tutorial picks up where part one ended. So if you haven't watched part one, make sure you head over and check out part one. And let's get started. I did nine squares and I haven't blocked these and each one of my square measures approximately 10 and a half inches by about 9 and a half inches. The total blanket width is not that big if you're doing a baby blanket, but if you want to make a larger blanket, you can create more squares or make a larger border which is also part of what we're going to do too. The border is going to be a lot of fun. I'm going to try something new. Using different strands of yarn. So this right here is about 30 inches wide, which is not big. That's a baby blanket. But like I was saying, if you want to add more, you can add more border around the edges. The way to do that is you just use normal stitches, one in each stitch around, and then to corner out your stitches, you do two of whatever stitch you chose, a chain in between, chain one or chain two, and then two more of those stitches all in the corner, and then you work your others. So you could work basically colored treble around the edges here if you wanted to add another inch onto each one of these squares. So there are tons of ways that you can modify your blanket to make it larger. I'm not. I'm going to keep it a baby blanket size, and the end product should be about 30 inches by about 32 inches. So something fun will plus the border, so maybe a little bit longer than that. Now I'm going to weave in these tails, and if you don't know how to weave in tails, here's a little quick tutorial on that. I usually grab a needle that has a very large eye, and this one has a very large eye, especially for using this plushy yarn. I twist the top of the yarn, and then pull it through. And then for C2C, I always think, you know, first you're going to pull it tight just to make sure that there's no looseness to it. And I always look for the double crochets right here, like this. And my first thing is I skip over the first double crochet, and then go back through the bottom of the next two, and pull it tight like that. And then I will skip over this first one, and go back through the other two, and then kind of weave it back through the next batch up to a space where I'll be back at the bottom of the next set of double crochets. Then pull it through, but don't pull it too tight. You don't want your tails to bunch up your actual stitches, which is easy to do. So make sure you pull it loose. Then once I'm there, I'll go back through, like I did by skipping that first double crochet, and going back through. And there, I just kind of do back and forth, mishmash, wherever I feel like I need to put it, and if it's weaved in enough, and I think that's good enough. So I'm just going to cut that. I'm going to pull it tight just a little bit, and then cut it. And then I'm going to stretch it out just a little bit, just to hide that tail in there. And you should be good to go. This yarn ends up having a lot of fuzzies, so you end up having to kind of pick them off and just brush them away. But that's how you weave in tails, if you're not familiar with it, or if you're new to it. So go ahead and continue weaving in all of your tails. And then when you're finished, we will end up working these squares together, and you're going to need your crochet hook and whatever chosen yarn you want to use. I'm going to use the cream colored because I just really like the seamlessness of the floating hearts. I don't really want them to be blocked out or squared, so I just want them floating hearts inside of my blanket. But I have a feeling that it would look super cute if you also rounded out or cornered out, or if you blocked them with color. But I just really don't want squares. I just kind of want my hearts to float inside the white, which is what the look I was going for. And then I want to have a colorful border with kind of poofies. I don't really know yet what I'm going to do, but we're going to do this together on camera. And then the pattern will be available on my blog. You have to get the zen feeling of weaving in tails. Okay, have you decided on how you want to organize your colors yet? Have you blocked them yet? That would be the next step to do is to block them. Let me grab my blocker, my steam blocker, and I'll show you how to block squares, and how to make them all the same size so that your blanket is uniform and it looks nice. And also remember whichever side is your front side, and you can tell the difference between the front side and the back side just by looking at the way that the half double crochet is on top. So usually your front side of your half double will have this little chain kind of facing for you towards you, and on the back side it's going to be facing away from you. But front side, back side is up to you, whichever you choose you want, but I kind of like the way this side looks, the front side, because it kind of makes this C2C part look like a raised quilt, and I really like the way that that looks. The back side doesn't really do that as much as this side, and I'm sure you can tell the difference just by looking at it. See how this has more of a squared out, and this one just doesn't have that same look to it. It kind of looks puffy right here. That's how you can tell the difference between the front side and the back side of your squares, because that will be important when we're actually seaming these together and crocheting them together. I saved these little tails so I can make TikTok videos. I use these blocking mats. You can use anything that's easy for you to use. You can use the foam mats that your child plays on. You can use anything that's pretty thick that you can stick pins into safely, and you want to make sure that you get some nice pins that aren't going to rust up when you actually do your blocking. I'm going to make sure that my square is face forward, and I'm going to block it out. Each square on a blocking mat is one inch, so you can kind of make all of your squares the same height and the same width just by following the little squares on your grid. I have these. They're knit blockers by Knitter's Pride, and I'll put a link for these in the description down below, because I really love using them. I think they're great. They have two different sizes. They have a large size and then a corner size. So what I normally do first is I'll block out the corners, and I'll start in a place where I want my corner to be, so I'm going to move this over to right here where it matches up with this corner here and put it right up there to that corner. I'm going to stretch this out just a little bit with the edge of my blocking, and I'm going to put it straight through like that. And I'm going to do the same with this one right here. And then from that starting point, I'm going to stretch it out and make sure that it's all the same and kind of stretch my stitches out. And it doesn't look like it's going to be matched up completely because it was about nine and a half, so I'm going to go to the middle of the square up here and block that right there about nine and a half inches. I'm thinking that's nine and a half. Let's count. Let's see. We've got one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, ten and a half. So I'm going to stick that right there through the top of my stitches. And I'm going to put that right there. Then I'm going to go down and kind of bring these over to that same space along the edges. So it looks like it'll be about nine and a half inches. So it'll be one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine. So now I'm going to pull this up to match the height of these up here. And I'm going to do the same on this side and match up all over here. And I blocked it out, so that looks good to me. I'm going to set that aside. Then I'm going to grab my steam blocker and show you how to steam block. I did a full tutorial video on using steam blockers, but I really love this steam blocker. It heats up really super fast. You just push this button on the front and the light comes on and once the light stops flashing it's ready to steam, which makes it so easy. So I just set it aside. I did a full tutorial video on this though. If you want to check it out, I'll put that link in the description below as well for how to steam block. But it's basically what I'm showing you right now too. So my light's already ready, which is great. I'm just going to depress this and you'll see the steam start coming out. You don't want to actually touch your project with the steamer. You just kind of want to make it go over your stitches, but since these are pretty thick stitches, I'm going to probably let it really do its work and I might even try to stretch them out a little bit while it's working. I think that's good. I'm going to stretch these out just a little bit while it's still kind of... or it's still kind of soft. So mine were about nine and a half by ten and a half. I'm going to go ahead and take these off and start putting these back where they belong in here. It's always good to put them back because these are sharp. Ta-da! Alright, there's our finished square that's all blocked and it looks really pretty and it's all the same size. So you can tell the difference between a blocked square and a not blocked square. You can see that the stitches have kind of settled down a little bit. They're not as puffy as they were before and you can see that it's not curling on the edges and it's a little bit wider. So you want to block your squares. You can block them before you join or you can join and then block everything afterwards. But I find that blocking your squares before you join makes it look a lot neater and a lot easier because then you know you're matching up everything together. So you can definitely tell the difference in something that's been relaxed and something that's not. I really love the puffiness of the not relaxed ones but eventually this is what it's going to end up looking like because of wear and tear and all that kind of stuff. So it's not going to keep this big puffy look forever just for a little while. Alright, so I'm going to finish blocking my squares and then we'll come back and I'll show you how to do the joins. So once we have all of our squares joined we'll be able to actually start crocheting the border around the entire blanket which is going to be really neat and I did a bunch of colors as you can see. So we're going to join through and create a stitch that gives a little bit of a raised look to the center of each of the squares. You can use a mattress stitch if you want if that's easier for you. Kind of wanting to play around with this a little bit. You can also use a different color in between your squares if you want. Like I was saying before I kind of want my blanket to just have floating hearts and just the design of the square inside just to kind of make it simple. But I'm really excited about it. So let's get started. Actually before we get started you want to decide how you want your colors. So I'll put a little graphic up there and show you how I did my colors. I tried to mix and match the cools and the warms. Reds are warm. Yellow is kind of a neutral. Greens are cool. And the blues are cool. So any blue purples are kind of neutral in between. So you can organize it however you want your blanket to look. Figure that out and then once you're ready to join and you figured out your pattern come back and we'll start joining. And I'm going to do the same. Okay so I decided how I wanted mine to be joined. This is the bottom row that's on top right here. And so what I'm going to do is kind of lay this out the way I want it to be joined. That's the bottom row. And I just like the way this looked so I kind of played around with it a little bit and this is what I'm going to do. Okay so once you have all of your squares laid out in the order that you want them we will start working our squares in a way that you're going to work up one whole column and so you're going to join basically six of your squares first and then you're going to take these other three and start joining up that way. And after they're all joined that way you're going to work across this way. So let's get started and I'm going to leave these the way they are because I don't want to mess up my order. So how you start and I'm joining these using a method that I saw on Bella Coco Crochet which I really liked because I went searching for a bunch of different method, join methods and I was like hmm which one, which one, which one but I really liked this one because it was simple and not only that but it was a little bit different and if you wanted to use a different color yarn it creates this really cool kind of like arrow pattern on the inside. But I'm using the same color yarn and I'm kind of tempted to use a different color but nope, I'm going to stick with my original plan. So how we start is you want to create a slip knot on your hook however you like to do your slip knots. Then we're going to find the corner that we worked for which was between the two half double crochets so mine's right here. We're going to insert our hook from top to bottom into the first corner square and then do a single crochet stitch around that. Then we pull our stitch out just a little bit and then head on over to the other square find that same corner we're going to go in from top to bottom on that then attach your yarn back attach your yarn onto the hook again and slip stitch through then you're going to find the next half double crochet and work into that and do a single crochet then we pull up again let go find the corresponding stitch put your hook back on your loop and then slip stitch through and you work that along the entire length of joining so we do a single crochet then we take that out go into the next stitch slip stitch through then go back into the next stitch on your other piece and do a single crochet and remember you can hold on to that loop so you don't lose it and also if you want to do a variation of this you can do working through the back loops which I might try then do a single crochet I can tell that tension is probably going to be an issue with this stitch so you might want to test it every now and then bring it down and see it does kind of create this a little bit of like a herringbone look to it when you get going so this is going to be really pretty and I'm really excited about that and I wonder how easy it frogs that's the real test does it frog easy yes it does frog easy okay so let's start joining these squares and then once you join all your squares remember you're going to work up your columns up here and then work across that way and let's see how that looks with a different color yeah that looks really pretty I really like that so get to joining your squares and then when we come back we'll be working the border that goes around the entire blanket check out part 3 for the border pattern and happy crocheting thanks for being here