I wanted to make a blanket for Anya before she was born. I never managed to knit well (slowly and poorly, but not well). I didn’t have a sewing machine at the time, so a quilt was out. I do, however, crochet well (and fairly quickly). After a lot of searching, I decided on a star-shaped pattern with rainbow stripes. Then I tried to find a series of yarn that had each color of the rainbow … never did manage that! Everything except the orange are Valley Yarn’s Stockbridge yarn.

The pattern is easy to work – pretty much just double crochet stitches. There are “shells” that expand the points of the star, and skips to form the V in the star. The biggest challenge I had was keeping track of how many stitches between the shell and the V for each row. I ended up with an Excel spreadsheet with a line for each ring.

The first couple of rows (which ended up being the ‘red’ section for me) looks like a slightly malformed circle. I was concerned the finished blanket wouldn’t look anything like the examples on the Ravelry page; but as the orange section finished up, I could see the spikes of the star.

By the time the green ring was finished, the blanket looked awesome.

Finishing up the blue rings:

 

I used a purple-blue color for the ‘indigo’ rings.

At this point, we attended a baby/toddler CPR course. The instructor offhandedly mentioned that she hates to waste everyone’s time since we’ve all heard a hundred times now that babies aren’t supposed to have anything in their cribs. No pillows, no bumpers, no blankets, no toys … wait, no blankets?? So the blanket I’m making for Anya before she’s born cannot be used until she’s a year old?!? I did mention to the course instructor that, no she wasn’t wasting peoples time. I’d never heard such a thing.

Now that Anya is five months old … there are lots of places to use blankets other than baby beds. This blanket gets snuggled around her in the car-seat whenever we leave the house.

Finished blanket is in the next post.