Franklin Habit put together a wonderful series of instructional posts and videos for his Patreon patrons about making a knitted crazy quilt. I could not resist. If you haven’t yet subscribed, go to Patreon right now and do it! His content is beautifully produced and always entertaining.

I started out making this in true crazy quilt style, using all kinds of leftovers in a variety of weights. As the project evolved, however, and especially after I started embroidering some of the earlier squares, I realized I preferred a little more consistency in weight and palette. I confess I ended up buying yarn specifically for this project, which was not at all my intention when I started. But I used up most of the yarn I set out to use up, and much of the new yarn, too, so it all worked out.

I also started out with the hope of making 121 squares, but willing to settle for 100. (After machine wash and dry, each square is about 6.5 x 6.5 inches.) As the project progressed, I revised that total downward to a still ambitious goal of 81 squares. Nearly six months later, I was delighted when I reached that mark! Then I sorted the completed squares into mostly warm and mostly cool tones, counted each pile to see how I might best distribute them…and discovered I had, not 81 squares, but 96! I have no idea how that happened, but I sat myself down and made four more for an even 100. 10 x 10 squares is an excellent size.

Since I tend to struggle with decision fatigue, and since these squares felt like starting a brand new multi-colored project every day, I came up with some guidelines to ease the process. First, I decided each square would be composed of primarily warm colors or primarily cool. Next, I decided I would always make two squares in a row of the same design, and keep one of the colors constant from one square to the next. Not only did this make the decisions easier, but it also ensured a subtle web of connection throughout the piece.

I used all of the charts Franklin provided, plus a bunch more of my own. (Some of my designs turned out to look better on paper than in real life, but I tried all of them at least once.) Nearly all of the charts, both mine and Franklin’s, evolved a little or a lot as I knit them over and over. The repetition was soothing, and the ongoing tweaking along with the ever-changing colors meant the project never got boring. I would not have expected to enjoy knitting 100 garter stitch intarsia squares, but I really did.

I was not looking forward to the embroidery. Because my only real attempt at embroidery, years ago, resulted in a knotted, frustrating mess, I gave myself permission right from the start to only embroider some of the squares, or none at all if I really hated it. The squares were plenty cute on their own, anyway. I had no idea how to approach it and no preconceived ideas of how I wanted it to look. I just sat down with some YouTube tutorials and got started.

And I LOVED it! Two experimental squares told me I wanted to do the embroidery in worsted weight, which was a surprise, but which also let me stick with the color palette I was already using. Embroidery with worsted weight yarn on worsted weight garter stitch is never going to yield a smooth, refined finish, but it is incredibly forgiving, which freed me to try anything and everything. And I did! I can’t remember the last time I had this much fun with yarn. Not all of the squares are what I would call successful, and a few of them are duds, but I had a blast. And I may have discovered a new artistic obsession.

I decided not to block them because the finished blanket will be washed and tumbled dry (it’s superwash); I didn’t want to seam anything that had been stretched and end up with a wavy seam after washing/drying the finished piece. So I just washed the squares and tumbled them dry. I did some before embroidering, and some afterward. This means the squares were not square, lol, but they were nice and squishy.

I sewed them together just as Franklin recommended, using whip stitch in fingering weight (I used Wollmeise because it’s so durable) with wrong sides facing. I alternated between warm and cool squares in both directions, but since many of the squares are mixed warm and cool, the color pattern is not overly checkerboard-y. I had planned to lay out all the squares and arrange them before sewing, but it takes a lot of space to lay out this many squares and I have three small dogs and a cat who all needed to walk on, lie on, roll on, and wrestle on the squares. It didn’t take long for me to decide to to just wing it, which is in keeping with the rest of the project anyway.

I started out thinking I might embroider over the whip stitching, but I actually liked the look of it, so I started making bigger stitches and using one of five different bright colors for each side of each block. My whip stitching is wobbly, but wobbly goes well with my wonky blocks and learn-as-you-go embroidery.

The top is plenty heavy without adding any backing, but I had all these carefully knotted ends all over the place from the embroidery, so a backing was required. I bought a big piece of extra wide quilt backing in a gray sort-of leopard print cotton flannel (I thought the flannel might keep it from sliding off the bed so easily).

I decided I wanted to bind the edges with fabric as with a quilt, so I added an eight-row garter stitch border all the way around. This gave me a surface to sew the binding onto. Because sewing thread has been known to cut yarn, I decided to work the border in sections, which would make it easier to repair later on if needed. This also enabled me to use up project yarn in intarsia-looking sections rather than stripes, which coordinates far better with the main body of the piece. Besides, I was not keen on working round and round such a huge perimeter.

Then I decided not to bind the edges. I didn’t like the look of the smooth binding on the edge of the squishy textural knitting. Instead, I decided to go with Franklin’s hemstitch method, which looks gorgeous on his sample. But it’s too hot to iron all that backing fabric and I’m not feeling up to wrestling with such a large and unwieldy project right now, so that’s on hold until fall. (Update january 2024: I’m sleeping under this marvelously snuggly blanket every night, but still haven’t mustered the fortitude to sew on that backing fabric.)