Baby Blanket

This post comes to you during the middle of the night because I'm up right now. Why am I up in the middle of the night? Excellent question, one that every woman that has ever been pregnant ever can answer. I have to pee! And of course it just doesn't end there, I'm hungry as well. So I'm eating. In addition, I have heartburn for which I popped some Tums. Actually it was the heartburn that woke me up. Did you know that they have heartburn tablets just for pregnant people? Amazing huh? And I'm not referring to Tums either. I was in the baby store and found them. They claim to not have the chalky taste of Tums but they are $12.00 a bottle. Now I ask you, would you pay $12.00 per bottle when you can get Tums for about $2.99? Lets put this into terminology that every knitter can understand, yarn money or chalky taste, yarn money or chalky taste. That's what I thought.

Enough with the commercials, we will be getting back to the regularly scheduled program. In my mad rush to get the requested photos, I realized that I left out some pretty important details concerning the baby blanket.

This is my personal design. I started by finding the perfect yarn for the project. It had to be very soft as it was touching a newborn baby and it needed to be available in baby colors. Knit Picks Shine fit the bill perfectly. I can recommend this yarn for anyone knitting baby items.

Next I had to find the perfect poem. So I got out Karolyn's big book of nursery rhymes and found the one that I wanted to knit up. Is more of a prayer really but I love it. Then I graphed it out and started knitting.

Once the center section was complete, I started on the flying geese border found in the Mason Dixon Knitting book. Now I have a few words to say about this border. Its not for the faint of heart or one that is interested in a quick knit. The geese almost did me in. That is correct, I was almost derailed by the geese and my baby would freeze because it did not have a blankie to snuggle up in. It was this image and this image alone that kept me going. I figured that the geese would be my lunchtime knitting project. I lost count on how many lunch breaks it took to get the geese to fly but fly they did.

The geese were then all hand sewn in place and some mitered corners were added. Again from the Mason Dixon book. At this point I felt like I was in the home stretch. I picked up stitches around the edge of all those geese and gartered up a yellow border. I just knit until I got tired of it and then applied an i-cord bind off. All of the knitting is now complete! I could have just screamed out in joy at this point!

Next I hand sewed on some cotton flannel to hide the back side of the blanket.

The blanket is now complete!

All in all, it took about 3 months to complete. Not nearly as fast as Svetlana but its not turtle pase either.

I ended up using 4 balls of the yellow, 2 balls of the green, 2 balls of blue, and 1.25 balls of purple.