Dove in the Rock

This is Bug’s blankie.

 

It used to have a white satin ribbon running through the holes, joined at a corner with a beautiful girly bow, but she pulled it out like a drawstring so often it made my paranoid self afraid she’d choke on it, so I removed it. I made it for her just before she arrived, when I had just discovered how to add crochet edging to fleece. It worked up significantly more quickly than Lou’s blankie, which was entirely crocheted (and done while I was in college and had much more free time), and thus became my new favorite baby gift to give. I like to buy the fleece generously-sized, then take a marker and go along the edge with a ruler and place a dot about 1/4 inch in from the edge, every 1/4 inch along the edge. Then I go back and poke holes in the dots with a large seam-ripper, taking care to make sure the holes are large enough for the crochet hook I plan to use. This is the tedious part, and I’ve heard one can serge the edge of the fleece to create the initial chain upon which to crochet, but I don’t have a serger. I’d like to try it with an overcast zigzag stitch on my sewing machine sometime to see if I could achieve similar results, because it would be much quicker.

Then I just start crocheting in the holes, with a single crochet to start and doing three single crochets in each corner hole. I’ve also done one where I punched the holes further apart and did a shell in each, for the base of the edge, and it came out well too. For this particular blanket I wanted a less-frilly edge because we didn’t know Bug’s gender before she arrived, so I did a picket-fence type edge. This was achieved by the following pattern:

Base – single crochet all around (3 singles in each corner hole)

Row 1 – repeat 2 double crochet and 1 chain, (2 double, 3 chain, 2 double in each corner)

Row 2 – single crochet in each chain below, then in the first double do a single crochet, then do three chains, then single crochet in the next double. This creates the cute little top of the picket fence.

This was the first time I learned that you can fudge things a little bit with blanket edgings. I did not calculate the exact number of holes I’d need for this particular edge. When I’d get to the end of a row where I needed to fit two stitches and there was only room for one, I would squeeze the two into the same spot, or I would undo a few stitches and squeeze the extra stitch in with another a few inches back. What I’ve learned is that the overall beauty of the blanket is absolutely not affected by a little well-placed fudging. And now, after three years of countless trips through mud puddles and potty accidents and drips and drool and the washing machine, the blanket is just as beautiful. And I didn’t even remember that I’d fudged it a little until I went to write up this pattern.

Posted on July 12th, 2007 by Dove
Filed under: Domestic Arts