Working out Kinks and Fingering Yarn

Yellow crochet baby blanket with three white flowers in each corner and a simple white border.

The blanket I made is fairly simple. It is yellow with a white border and three crochet flowers in each corner. They are small five petal flowers that I learned how to make from this blog post.

The first thing you need to do to make your own blanket is to figure out your gauge in the stitch pattern you want. I chose to use a plain single crochet background so I made a swatch of about 20 single crochet stitches and worked even until I had about 4 inches of fabric. My gauge ended up being 10 stitches per 4 inches. It really doesn’t come out that even very often. I wanted the blanket to be about 36” including the border. Allowing an inch for the border on each side it would need to be 34” so with my gauge of 10 stitches per 4 inches, I would need 85 stitches. Simple enough. Then I just continued working row upon row of single crochet until the blanket was square. I added a border of 4 single crochet rows in white. I was going for a classic and clean effect but you could use any kind of border you wanted. A lace border would be really pretty. There are a couple of things to note when working a crochet border in the round. You need to work three stitches into each corner stitch/ this makes the corners square. Another thing to remember is when you get to the end of the round you join the stitch you just finished to the first stitch of the round with a slip stitch. Then you chain 1 for single crochet and turn the work to start the next round.

I added 12 flowers to my blanket. They were small and I put 3 in each corner. You can use as few or as many flowers as you want. It would even be nice to use just one large flower or none at all. Be creative and experiment.

The yarn I used was Bernat Softee Baby in Lemon and White. I double stranded the yarn and needed 4 balls of Lemon and 1 ball of white. You can make a baby blanket as thick or thin as you want it. Just figure out your gauge and how many stitches you need.

This is the baby blanket I made for my cousin who is due any day now. Her first two children wore holes in their baby blankets so I’m hoping this one holds up a little longer. One thing I know is that it will be very well loved.