Hello lovely reader!

I did it! I may have been hustling to the last minute to get it finally done, but that doesn’t matter anymore! The blanket has been finished and handed over to the lovely family at Christmas to enjoy!

Here’s a few photos, because what’s a handmade blanket without some showing off?

So you may be asking yourself, or me, “how was this made?!” Well, obviously it was crocheted. (If that’s how it’s spelled.) And the creation is my own.  Sort of.  I didn’t work form a pre-existing pattern, but I did combine several different stitches to make this happen.

For those of you who know how to crochet and want to make something similar, here’s a handy little “pattern” to work from:

Step 1: Chain stitches until it’s about 3 feet. (I know, blasphemy. Sorry, I don’t count, I just go by eye)
Step 2: In the second stitch from your hook; Half double crochet stitches, all the way back to the end. Make 2 chain stitches, and turn your work.
Step 3: Do the same as step 2, until you have a total of 5 rows of half-double stitches
Step 4: The sixth, seven and eighth row, will be Double crochet stitches.
Step 5:  After the 3 Double crochet rows, make another 5 half-double crochet rows; Interchange between 3 rows of double and 5 rows of half-double stitches, until you reach your desired length. (Yup. Judge all you want, it’s the perfect length until she’s 5 years old)
Step 6:  You finished the body, now we do the trim.  Start with a nice complimentary color, or a crazy color if you’re bold, and single crochet stitches all the way around the entire work.  When you reach an edge, do 3 single crochet stitches into each corner stitch.
Step 7: When you reach the beginning of the trim, connect the single crochet’s together, chain 2, and continue all the way around doing Half-double stitches into each single crochet.
Step 8: At the corners, since you have 3 single crochet stitches, this time do 3 half-double stitches into the middle single crochet.  Every single crochet stitch will have a half-double going into it, except the corners will have 3 in one stitch.
Step 9: The fun part.  After reaching the end/beginning and connecting the half-doubles together, Chain 2 stitches.  In the second stitch from your hook, do 4 double crochet stitches; skip the next 2 half-doubles, in the third half-double, do a single crochet stitch.
Step 10: Skip 2 half-doubles, create 5 double crochet stitches into the third half-double, skip 2 half-doubles, do a single crochet into the third half-double.  Keep repeating step 10, until you reach the beginning/end and connect.  Then you just do the fun part of fastening off and all that jazz.

As you can tell, I am not good at “writing” what I do.  I don’t do abbreviations, sorry, my brain doesn’t work like that.  This is a really simple pattern, if you want me to do the proper abbreviations, I can. But I didn’t think it was necessary.  Also, if anything doesn’t make sense or needs to be elaborated, please feel free to ask me in the comments.

If you are a true beginner to crochet, and don’t know what any of the terms mean, I highly recommend getting yourself a beginners book, or even watching a few youtube videos to learn what the terminology is and how to do each stitch.  It is not as hard as it looks, and yeah, at first your work is gonna look ugly, but trust me, you just have to get your hand to learn what you want it to do.  The rest will follow, and you will be making lovely blankets before you know it!

This blanket would probably have come out way more symmetrical if I used exact stitch counts, but I just go by what looks about right, and continue from there.  So the work you get with this pattern, may not be perfect.  Especially with the shell stitches.  Sorry.

I’m not sorry.

Happy New Year!

Quirkily yours,
The Quirky Digest