Granny Stripes...

A friend at work is expecting a baby soon, and so I decided to make her a baby blanket. I've made one before that was a big granny square, but this time I wanted to do something different. Preferably something with stripes because I'm a big fan of them and I know my coworker is just as eccentric as I am, if not more, and would appreciate them too. However, I didn't want to do a ripple blanket, because, honestly, I'm a bit afraid of them. I could have done a simple blanket out of double crochet and just alternated the couple every couple of rows or so, but that would have been boring. I found the solution to my problem on the crochet blog, Attic24: Granny stripes!

The directions were a bit daunting at first because I am horrible at remembering what abbreviation means what stitch. Also, the author of Attic24 is from the UK, and they have different names for different stitches over there. (She posts a warning about that - something I didn't notice until my third read through of the pattern.) I decided to to a practice square, and to my surprise, the pattern actually turned out to be really easy! (Which I'm sure is the case with the ripple blanket as well)

I went a bit wider on the width of the blanket than I was originally planning to; I did a chain of 90 (for a granny stripe you're supposed to do the base chain in multiples of 3) but that didn't seem wide enough so I bumped the base chain up to 150 (I cannot find my tape measurer though, so I have no idea how long that actually is - other than a good length for a granny stripe scarf) If I make the length of the blanket 1.5 times the width, or maybe 2 times the width, it should last the soon-to-be-mininess for long time....

(Row 1 and row 2 are not impressive)

(If I had stopped there, it would have been the perfect scarf)

(It's getting bigger!)

On other fronts, another friend was hired in at a local theme park recently. He invited us to come and visit the company store with him - which was full of items that were out of season, or they had too much of, or made specifically for the company employees only. While there I found a tote bag that I put into use as my crochet bag as soon as I got home. So now my yarn and crochet hooks are all in one place (mostly) and not scattered around the love seat.