Knitting a square & joining things.

[jackandahat]

(Forgive me, this is going to be a stupid question)

I'm trying to join some other pieces together by picking up a side from each and knitting a square in the middle, decreasing towards the centre.

But I'm struggling with the "How many and how often?" part of decreasing. Doing sl1 k2tog psso at each corner still gets me a lump in the middle.

How would you decrease to make a flat square?

Second, hopefully less daft question - how do you go about joining pieces using knitting? I'd like to make an afghan out of blocks, but I'd rather not do that amount of sewing if possible. Which is where I ended up on the problem above. All the patterns I've found so far are either log-cabin type where it gets bigger and bigger, rather than something you can work on in small pieces, or they're pieces sewn together after.

Comments

[hobbitbabe]

When we were kids, we made lots of single squares out of our mother's scraps, and then I enlisted a neighbour to show me how to crochet them together. I don't know the names of the crochet stitches, so I can't tell someone else how I did it without showing. But basically it involved drawing a couple of loops through one square and securing them, then making a little chain over to the next square, and zigzagging back and forth. To minimize the number of ends I'd have to sew in, I used a series of zig-zag diagonals to build up the afghan. The crochet seams were quite open - like you would stick toes through them accidentally - but that helped with our widely varying size of squares.

More recently, I've done an afghan that was long strips like scarves, sewn together with mattress stitch, and a couple that were built up from mitred squares so they wouldn't meet your criteria of having lightweight pieces until the end.

[jackandahat]

Wouldn't meet the criteria, no, but it is always interesting to hear how other people have done stuff - that's what I like about the comms. (Also, it's only right *now* that I need them to be lightweight, that could change in future. So good to know!)

The crochet way sounds useful, especially if it lets you do varying sizes of shapes.