I have taken several sets of pictures for Jaime, including of her mom and girls, before her mom passed away. She is now expecting her third child, a boy, and asked if I would knit a blanket and hat from her mom’s stash. How could I say no? I had just seen this blanket, and it seemed like a great project to use up stash. I will not have enough of some colors to follow the original stripe pattern, but it’s going to turn out cute!

I also made a couple of hats for the baby (there was tons of yarn.) The hat with the long tail was based on this hat although sadly there is no pattern available, so I had to wing it. The second hat, light blue, was just my own creation.

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Blanket notes:
Because of the nature of this project, I did not keep track of the weight, yardage, etc. I started with the two yarns I had the most of (the beige and the dark gray) for the background, and then just went by color. There were a lot of blues in the box that didn’t all go together, so I tried to stick with yarns that complimented each other. Some yarns were held double; between that and missing labels, it would have been difficult to keep track of yardage. It’s definitely a one-of-a-kind blanket!! (I used all the yarns in the bottom picture except for the two front and center.)

I thought the pattern was great. Nothing too profound, but very simple and easy to remember; this is one of those patterns that lets your color / yarn choice shine.

One hint if you really are a beginner: I put stitch markers between the all the k2tog’s and ssk’s, so that I would not have to count on the right side at all.

If I did this one again, I would probably cast on for one or two more repeats (and buy extra yarn.) I recalled when I was about one third in that Jaime had requested a blanket big enough for a toddler. I’ll have to really block it out.

Took a full day to weave in all the ends, but half of those were to make the best use of yarn :P