Exciting news, I'm an auntie again! And now that my NEPHEW Alfred has arrived and has received his blanket I can finally share it with you.
It felt like I'd barely finished knitting a blanket for my niece Alice when my brother and SIL announced that they were expecting number 2. Alfred arrived exactly 1 year and 2 months after his sister so I'm only barely exaggerating! Despite feeling like I needed a bigger rest than that between blankets I went ahead and started looking at patterns to give myself lots of time pick just the right one. This is a lengthy process for me, a blanket is a big project so it has to be something I will enjoy knitting, with a finished object that will bring me joy whenever I see it. In this case it also had to be unisex without using colours which would bore me to death. Alice's blanket had been very well received, to the point where my SIL has stated quite clearly that Alice will not be taking it away with her when she leaves home! The temptation to just knit a second version of that blanket was strong but I decided to look for something similar instead.
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| Alice's Mosaic blanket as modelled by Cassie |
In the end I plumped for
Tickled Pink from
60 Quick Baby Blankets. There are loads of cute patterns in this book so I didn't really mind buying a book for just one pattern. Obviously I wasn't actually going to use pink, plumping instead for all of the colours of the rainbow.
I used DROPS Paris again because I really liked it for Alice's blanket. It's really snuggly, washes well and cotton is perfect for my brother's flat which gets very hot all year round. I had to guess how much yarn I would need as I was using more colours than the blanket in the book. I ordered 2 balls of each colour and 6 of the white and hoped that would do the trick. As it turns out, I could have stopped knitting after I reached the end of the coloured balls and I ran out of white half way through the border so unfortunately my estimates were way off! I did do one stripe of each colour from the 2nd balls just to justify having bought them but I so much left that I've made a whole heap of rainbow baby clothes to show off soon.
Unfortunately the pattern for this blanket is shocking awful, there are loads of errata and the border instructions defy logic. However this is a really simple blanket and it's easy to get the gist of the stitch pattern and then do your own thing. I basically cast on until it looked wide enough and then knit until the length looked proportionally right and I'd finished a complete rainbow. I then picked up 2 in every 3 stitches along the sides and knit on each border separately. I'm really pleased with how it turned out, so much so that I was very sorely tempted to keep it for myself! Nevertheless I handed it over, a very special blanket for a very special boy. I hope he loves it as much as I do.
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| Lissy for size reference |
I used DROPS Paris again because I really liked it for Alice's blanket. It's really snuggly, washes well and cotton is perfect for my brother's flat which gets very hot all year round. I had to guess how much yarn I would need as I was using more colours than the blanket in the book. I ordered 2 balls of each colour and 6 of the white and hoped that would do the trick. As it turns out, I could have stopped knitting after I reached the end of the coloured balls and I ran out of white half way through the border so unfortunately my estimates were way off! I did do one stripe of each colour from the 2nd balls just to justify having bought them but I so much left that I've made a whole heap of rainbow baby clothes to show off soon.
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