Babette Construction - Introduction

I'm going to be making a Babette Blanket but using a Join As You Go method I've written about previously.  Theres a Crochet A-Long (CAL) on Ravelry that I'm joining in with and some people there expressed interest in what I'm trying to do.  As a result I'm going to keep a record here of what I'm doing and try to explain how I'm doing it so that others can do the same if they wish.


The disadvantage of the Babette that puts most people off is usually the many ends to weave in as well as having to seam all those squares together.  While the number of ends can depend on how often you change colours, my method of joining does not add to this number and doesn't use much extra yarn (to me its seems I'm using no extra yarn).

So lets get on with the yarn I'm using, which is Stylecraft Special DK.  This is an acrylic yarn, double knit weight which is cheap and very soft (unlike some acrylics I've seen).  Having some some swatches recently I found I needed to use a 5mm hook for this (I just hope my gauge doesn't change).

Something I realised from reading the forums on Ravelry was that some people found that their smallest squares were too large in proportion to the others and meant the squares did not fit together as they were supposed to. There are a couple of fixes for this, you could make the smaller squares with Half Double Crochets(HDC's) instead of Double Crochets (DC's) or use a smaller hook for those small squares only.  Just to clarify I'm talking about the two round squares only, you shouldn't need to adjust any other size square.

When I first swatched for a Babette I seamed my squares together and found that the smallest squares were too big and needed adjustment.  It was trying to fix this that stopped me from starting my project and in the end I gave up.  It was while swatching with the joining method I'm now using  that I noticed my joining method seemed to improve the fit to the point that I didn't need to make any adjustments to the smaller squares at all.  I'm assuming that the fit problem was due to the seams adding extra width which in something this large would cause problems.

So for now here's a picture of my yarn and another picture showing my layout coloured in with an extra section I designed myself (I wanted a rectangle not a square).

Have Fun!

Julie