The second tutorial in my rainbow giveaway series is my version of the granny rainbow hat.

I was originally inspired by this rainbow beany by revving it up (I do my best to give credit where it’s due), but when I made one for my daughter, it came out a little bit lumpy. I guess it’s a gauge thing. She wears it anyway.

I was set on having a rainbow hat in the series, so I decided to put some work in and figure out instructions that worked for me. There was some undo-redo, but in the end I came up with a very simple pattern that starts round and stays round, which makes me sooooo happy. I guess it’s an OCD thing.

By the way, if you haven’t entered the giveaway yet – there’s still time! For details click here. It’s open until February 28th, and you can win this hat or enough yarn to make it (and more).

Those are all 96 circles for my granny blanket, in their final arrangement.

I made 16 groups of 6, each group included all 6 variations of 3 colors. I arranged the first two rows to include one representative of each group, in an eye pleasing manner (making sure that adjacent circles didn’t have too many colors in common). Then, for the next two rows I chose circles where the outer color was the same as the second color in the first two rows, and for the third set of two rows I chose circles where the outer color was the same as the center color in the first two rows, while keeping the same order of groups. This made the color matching much easier (I only had to do it once for the first set of rows), while still keeping a lot of variation. For the last 6 rows, I simply copied the first 6 rows. I was afraid of how long this process might take, but I was done in no time, and am quite happy with the result.

That is my bag of finished granny-circles-ready-to-become-squares, 14 sets out of 16 that I need. The system that I used was – take 3 colors and make all 6 variations of ordering those 3 colors, that way I hoped to keep the yarn usage even between the various balls of yarn. Well, it worked. Almost. I finished 5 circles from set number 15 (remember, I need 16! I’m so close!) and I ran out of light blue yarn at the very last final circle. Then I realized that the lighter shade of yellow wouldn’t carry me through set 16 either. So, I guess it’s back to the yarn store. Oh no… #not.

Here you can see my count-down to 16 sets, and the unfinished and very sad 15th set, with my fabulous cat sayings WIP drawstring bag.

If I’m going to be sick at home, I might as well get some work done on my sunburst granny blanket. Right?

After last time, I started to realize that this project was going to cost me a lot of money and time. I thought how I could save some of both, so I decided to revise the pattern slightly.

One square doesn’t really photograph well, but all in all, much better than the brown experiment, don’t you think?

Here’s my modified pattern:

This may not look very exciting, but that’s because it’s just the first step in an enormous project to make a crochet granny square blanket. I used some left over (from various crochet teddy bears and dogs) brown yarn to make a test square. First, to get an idea of the size (this is a giant 15cm X 15cm square) and second, to estimate how much yarn I will need.

I was originally inspired by this hex-bag project from future girl. I even made my own version last year. But – it’s a cold winter, and unfortunately, I can’t cuddle inside the bag…