Purple & White Baby Blanket

Last year I crocheted a baby blanket for my friend as a gift before she gave birth to her first baby. Well, time flies because her baby girl just turned 1! For her birthday, I decided to make her a new, bigger blanket. Now, I like attempting to craft and create things but I’m not very crafty. I haven’t had the time to learn how to crochet any patterns or cool designs so all I know how to do is just your basic crochet.

I did want to make it look more fun and not plain though so what I decided to do was use three colors: white, light purple, and a dark purple.

I didn’t use up all of this yarn at all, but better to have too much than not enough is my motto! Last time I had to make a run to buy more yarn and luckily I was able to get the exact yarn because I don’t know what I would do if I had half a blanket done and no more yarn!

So what did I do with these three colors? I made 12in. x 12in. (roughly) squares and envisioned a 4 ft. by 3ft. blanket.

The squares were roughly the same size, but not exact. Even though I was striving for 12×12 it was hard because sometimes my stitches were looser or any host of other things so the squares didn’t all end up the same size. But, hey, that just shows I really made it myself, right?

Then, I used this tutorial – here – to join the squares together using a slip stitch and single crochet seaming. I mapped out on paper the color sequencing ahead of time which I highly recommend! It really helped me stay organized and when the time came to join the squares together I didn’t need to think about which squares needed to be attached. I decided to use the white yarn for all the seaming.

Um, so as you can really see here my squares weren’t all the same size, but it ended up working out! At least now you can tell it’s really homemade….

You can only really see the seams on the underside of the blanket, but I like it. I later double knotted the strands, used a yarn needle to tuck the ends in a bit and then trimmed with a scissor.

The last part of the blanket was the border. I, again, don’t know how how to do anything fancy at all, but I tried to be creative and use the basics that I do know to make something more fun. I first went around the blanket with the dark purple. Then, the light purple. Last, I went around with the white, but this time I did the blanket edging technique that I found – here -. After every 5 stitches I inserted the crochet hook down to the purple layer – this is the reason I started out with the dark purple, so that the white spike would really pop.

I really love the way the blanket turned out despite the un-uniform size of the squares. I had to do a bit of stretching so that the edges of the blanket weren’t all uneven, but you work with what you have! I especially love how the border turned out and am pretty proud of myself for turning my limited skills into something that looks creative.

I think I have enough yarn left to make a blanket for myself. I still haven’t learned any patterns yet, so I think I’ll be doing something along the line of stripes….or seeing as I have a lot of white yarn left I think it’ll be mostly white with thick striped purple ends. I’ll be sure to share what I come up with when it’s finished!