Last week, I mentioned my afghan in progress made of mitred squares knit in leftover sock yarn and realized I’d never given that project its own post. Today we fix that!

Here’s the base square. This one is knit in (hmm) Collinette Jitterbug, in the colourway Monet. That’s the Ravelry link as it looks like this yarn might be discontinued.

I like knitting mitred squares. They’re easy and the result looks good. One of my favorite books about them is Domino Knitting by Vivian Høxbro – here’s the Amazon.ca link for the book, here’s the Ravelry link and here’s VH’s website. This is a lovely little book with a number of interesting projects.

From this, I developed my sock yarn square. For a mitred square with a central stockinette stitch, you cast on an odd number of stitches, and this makes the outer edge of the L. That central stitch remains in stockinette (knit on the right side and purled on the wrong side) while the rest of the square is knit in garter stitch (all knit, all the time). It makes a prettier edge if you slip the first stitch on each row, and that also makes it easy to pick up stitches and add new squares to the existing ones. it saves you seaming if you just knit them together.

Here are my afghan blocks so far:

I’m piecing them together in blocks of 24 squares. I decided on a big block size to keep from having too many repeats in the same area – you can see that these two blocks shouldn’t be right beside each other. I might set them up to make them radiate from a central point instead of like this. We’ll see.

Mitred Sock Yarn Block
I knit mine on a 2.5mm needle.

Cast on 49 stitches.
R1 (RS): Knit
R2 (WS): knit 24, P1, place marker, knit 24
R3 (RS): Slip one, knit to 2 sts before marker, k2tog, slip marker, k1, SSK, knit to end.
R4 (WS): Slip one, knit to 1 stitch before marker, P1, knit to end

Continue as established, repeating rows 3 and 4 and decreasing two stitches on each RS row, until there are 3 sts left. SSK and draw end through the loop to finish.