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Wintertime blanket-making

There is nothing I like more in the winter than to cozy up under the covers with some trashy reality tv and a project to sew:)  Lately, I've been working on baby blankets for friends. 

This one is a pattern from Lion brand yarns online called "Bright Flower Throw."  I chose different colors (Little Boy Blue, Sweet Pea, Chocolate Cake and Lamb) mainly because most of my friends seem to have boys:)

I started off by making bunches of the same granny hexagon:)


And, then simply whipstitched them all together to form the pattern.


This looked wonderful, but came out about the size of a placemat, so I decided to double the pattern.  Then, I realized that with hexagons, the part where they came together wouldn't have been even, so I made a strip of the "lamb" hexagons to be the bridge between the two blankets.


I think it turned out pretty nice overall, and I was much happier with the finished size of this one.  (Excuse the Christmas decorations on the table, this post should've been finished a LOOOONG time ago!)  Anyway, it made a lovely gift for our friends Ward and Jodie's new little boy, Rafferty.

So, I made a blanket, and Wardie made this.



Very creative use of the crochet needles, don't you think?

The sad part is, this is probably what my sewing looks like in his eyes...sigh...I also found some of my needles in the bed of his tractor.  I think I rounded them all up, but we'll see when I start the next project.

Crocheting is awesome.  MUCH easier than knitting, in my opinion.  I'm knitting a blanket right now, and it takes me forever to keep counting stitches and make sure I'm not dropping any, etc.  What a pain!  Crocheting is almost foolproof and clearly, I need that:)

I have a book of blankets that I love for knitting, but I found the Lion Brand website that has both free crochet and knit patterns on it.  Here are my thoughts about the Lion Brand patterns on the website after trying a couple of them.
  1. The website is awesome.  Easy to navigate, easy to find colors in projects, and easy to order the yarn right then and there.
  2. They send you free email newsletters with sales and new patterns to try--very cool.
  3. However, the patterns seem to be MUCH smaller than expected and the yarn called for seems to be less than needed, too, which of course means more expensive projects than originally anticipated. 
I'll have to try some projects other than blankets to see how those turn out before I make my final call.

Happy sewing!

Comments

  1. AnonymousFebruary 23, 2011 at 9:01 PM

    Beautiful, creative, glorious....oh yeah, and your blanket is nice too. LOLOL

    ReplyDelete

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