I can’t resist the urge to rescue granny-square afghans when I come across them in my estate-sale adventures–especially when they are the frugal type that mix random colors as if the creator was using up odds and ends from her yarn basket. The black yarn that forms the outer rim of each square sets off the colors and ties the design together in a most wonderful way.

This afghan had seen better days. Many squares were disintegrating.

The pink yarn was especially fragile.

Big empty spaces were left when I removed the damaged squares.

I pondered grafting new middles into squares whose outer parts were intact.

I did this when I repaired a granny-square afghan inherited from my grandmother, which was the subject of a Yarn Mania post back in 2018. But granny squares are created from the center outward rather than from the edges inward and, try as I might, I couldn’t reconstruct how I managed the grafting process when I repaired my grandmother’s afghan.

So I made new squares from scratch, which is fun..

Repair underway.

Here are a new square and an old square side by side, with the new square on the right. As you can see, the new squares blend in fine with the original ones.

The afghan originally had a crocheted border all the way around to finish it off.

I had to remove it because some of the new squares were added at the edges, but when I finished.my repairs I added a new border in a different style.

Here’s the finished project.