Out of the Frying Pan

I decided that both because I was quite unsure if the amount of wool that I have would make it all of the way through the "Modern Classic Baby Blanket" and that the mottled over-dye distracted from the lovely stitch pattern anyway, and that, to be honest, being still a novice crocheter there were times when I couldn't understand what I was supposed to do -- I would set that pattern aside and go for a more sure thing.  I searched online for patterns specifically using Jaeger Baby Merino DK, and came up with the "Basic Blanket" from Simple Crochet for Cherished Babies by Jane Davis, which, wonder of wonders, is held by my public library and was on the shelf at that very moment. 

The construction is a bit strange, and not quite clear since there is only one photo of the finished blanket in the book and it's scrunched and folded over on itself, and the instructions never say "make a second panel" but I think this is how it goes: you work the DC panel, turn that on its side and work the edging, then break the yarn and work the edging on the other side, and then make a second panel in the same way and sew them together up the middle.

You can't quite see them in my photo, but there are three safety pins where I joined in new balls of yarn -- the first about a third of the way up the main panel, the second almost two-thirds up, and the third a row or two into the edging (near where the crochet hook is at the moment).  That is, yes, four balls of yarn so far, with six more rows of the first border section and all eleven rows on the second still to go -- and I have ten balls altogether.  Rather naïvely, I suppose, I did not make a gauge swatch, since I'm using the same yarn and a one-size-smaller hook, but it turns out that my gauge is much bigger than the one in the pattern, so I suppose that's at least part of the issue.  Regardless, though, I don't think ten balls of yarn is enough as it stands now, and so I need to figure out how much smaller I must make the blanket in order to use as much of the yarn as possible.

I do rather like the overdye with this pattern, though -- it's not quite as "busy" as the Modern Classic blanket (which, again, I think would be wonderful in a solid yarn, and I will keep it in mind as a potential future project).  It might be also that this one has a bit more "space" in the twiddly part, more lacy-ness, as it were --

Comments

[David MacDougall Beach]

sorry.. Im still fascinated by the snowflake crochet patterns... a world I had no idea existed