This is a bold, bright and cheery, gender neutral blanket, graphic enough to hold the attention of any baby’s inquisitive eyes and keep them warm and snuggly.

I make up most of my own designs without much forethought of color, yarn quantity and pattern, so I usually start my blankets from the middle with a foundation row of hdc and work from middle out on both sides. This provides for a mirror image of the pattern and also helps to balance the color scheme in case I don’t have enough yarn of one color, crocheting equally on each side. It’s not fun to start at one end with a color scheme and pattern only to play yarn chicken at the other end. You could always go out and buy more yarn. However, I like to use what I have on hand and find that adding more color and stitch texture as I crochet along keeps me from getting board.

The colors of the following baby blanket pattern I had on hand in my stash. They were calling to me to combine them for a long time. The following pattern just came about as I worked on it. It was “apparent” (pun intended) to be a baby blanket, so I went with the vertical striping to meet a comfortable crib size approximately 36x52”.