Blanket for Baby J

They say, “we’re going to have a baby.”  I hear, “go buy yarn.”  Baby blankets are one of my favorite things to knit.  The yarn is always soft, and I love trying to come up with something that will go with the parents in some way.

When Mzzzz Jones, one of my best friends from law school, said she and her husband were expecting, Mommy and I scampered off to JoAnn’s to find the perfect yarn. 

Mzzzz Jones is particularly sophisticated, in the old school Southern way that Vanderbilt had to train me in, so I wanted something soft, simple and almost elegant.  I was thinking something in navy and white, but JoAnn’s didn’t have any soft yarn in navy.  I went up and down the aisles, looking for the right texture and colors.  I finally settled on Bernat Softee Baby in Antique White and Soft Lilac, which I thought was grey and looks grey in some light, lavender in others and blue in others.

I didn’t want to do a plain garter stitch blanket and didn’t really have ideas, so I picked up a pattern book, Car Seat Blankets by Becky Stevens.  I chose a pattern I liked and decided I’d make it bigger.  I increased the border as well as the overall dimensions.  I also wanted multi-color, so decided to add stripes.   The picture with the pattern looked like this:

However, when I got to the pattern part, I didn’t like how it was coming out with my yarn.  The pattern looked really different and it made the blanket feel to thin and delicate.   I decided not to do the whole blanket with the pattern.  Instead, I did the increased border of seed-stitch, an inner border of the pattern and then did the full interior of the blanket in seed stitch again.  I really liked the way it came out.  The Softee Baby yarn is soft and thin.  The seed stitch gave the blanket fullness that the other patterns didn’t have.  - I tried the yarn in garter and stockinette stitches, too.

Baby blankets need that silky edge for baby’s fingers to rub, so I just had to add some blanket binding.  Since my friend is having a boy, I went with light blue, which also made the grey/lilac/blue/whatever yarn appear a bit more to the bluer side.  I was very pleased with how the blanket came out.

Mzzzz Jones liked it a lot, too.  I can’t wait to see if the baby likes it as well, but there’s a few more months before he arrives, let alone realizes he has a blanket.

Finished blanket