Some very good friends of ours recently had their first child, a son named Reuben, and this is the blanket I made for him:

It’s a very traditional granny square crochet blanket, I love these because I can take a ball of wool and a hook with me to anywhere and just make another square or two when nothing else is happening, but I never have to carry around the full project until I’m assembling it right at the end. The border is one round of trebles and another of double crochet – as simple as anything!

If you’re reading my main blog feed, this post may take you by surprise – however at one time I enjoyed crafting and blogged about it often. Recently I’ve been finding more time for this, helped by the inspiring news of pregnant friends, so hopefully this is the first in a resurgence of craft-related articles. There are category-specific feeds if you’d rather only read the tech and/or php content.

So, I crocheted a blanket for my friend’s baby (welcome, Benjamin!)

Continue reading →

For a few month I’ve been working on a handmade blanket for a baby expected by a couple of my friends – and I’ve finally been to visit and deliver it so here’s some details of the project. (OK so baby Ethan is about a month old and I only just made it round but, meh, life’s been busy! On the plus side, he’s big enough to be alert and kick about on his mat and look at us so that was really cute!!)

Its a basic ripple pattern, I have the 7 Day Afghans book and I reduced one of the patterns in there to baby-size with fewer repeats. It was a 6ml hook and the wool was taken entirely from my existing stash, basically it was a stripe or two of each of the DK weight wool I had lying around. So it’s colourful, and it helped make space in my life for more wool, and it was very inexpensive (i.e. free!), so on the whole the perfect project. Here’s the finished article:

And a close-up of those ripples:

I’ve made a round ripple before but never a straight one, although I kept looking at patterns for them. When I heard about Deb’s pregnancy, I knew this was exactly the blanket I wanted to make! So, welcome Ethan, and good health to all the family.