Stella Baby Blanket

I seem to be getting to an age where family members are popping babies out left right and centre! This is great, I flipping well love babies and I am so grateful that my daughters have lots of lovely cousins. I do seem to spend a lot of time knitting blankets though!

Rainbow blankie the first

Having knitted a fantastic rainbow blanket for my eldest nephew last year, I was still feeling a very strong rainbow vibe when Stu's brother announced that he was going to be a daddy. Much as I love The original rainbow blanket I didn't want to knit the same one again so I spent some very peaceful hours searching blanket patterns before settling for the Stella Baby Blanket by Kate Gondwana. I also decided to go for a 'dark rainbow' this time using black stripes instead of white between eash rainbow stripe.

The centre part of the blanket knitted up really fast, and by the time I had completed a whole rainbow I could have actually stopped knitting and had a nice baby sized blanket. I still had a fair bit of yan left however and I like to give a larger blanket that can be used throughout childhood so I decided to add another rainbow. For the centre rainbow I had made each rainbow stripe 6 rows high, with the black stripes 2 rows high but for the second rainbow I only made the rainbow stripes 4 rows high, partly for visual interest and secondly because I didn't want it to be too big. This was definitely a good decision because the finished blanket is quite large, the rows towards the end were incredibly long and I ended up having to buy more yarn twice! I think the final row took almost an entire ball of DROPS Paris to complete.

The end result was totally worth the work, I love this blanket and the new mum and dad were really happy with it too. I’m sure my new nephew loves it too but he’s far too busy being tiny and scrumptious to have an opinion right now! Despite the long rows towards the end, this was a fun knit and I'm even considering knitting another for myself but adding a 3rd rainbow with even smaller stripes. I'll wait a while though, just until the memory of managing over 2 metres of circular knitting needles fades a bit!