Baby blankie

When I finished this about a week ago I thought I really didn't have anything much to blog about. It's a baby blanket, for a friend's soon-to-be baby - what can be said about that? But then I remembered I didn't use the suggested yarn, so I had to Do Maths. And that's definitely something to write about.

It was simple enough to make - square and in long stripes, double (US) or treble (UK) crochet throughout. The yarn give was a worsted weight though, which we don't get in the UK. The closest we have is aran, but I couldn't find any in the colours I wanted. So I decided to go with DK. And that's where Doing Maths came in. I duly made up a tension square and worked out that I needed half again as many stitches for the length and rows for the width. Rather surprisingly I thought; I'd expected to have to double up on everything. A neat lesson there on why a tension square is so important!

It all went swimmingly well until I got the border - surely a double crochet wasn't going to be long enough to weave the braid through? After a couple of tests I settled on triple. Incidentally another break from the pattern was that I chose a different colour for the border rather than use one of the blues as per the pattern. Another problem came with the braid - the thinner yarn meant many more strands, but how many. Again with some experimentation, I worked it all out. I had to braid the yarn by holding it in my teeth!

I think it turned out OK - judge for yourself: