Beneath The Blankey Round 3: The Modern

In this year of first retirements, I’ve crocheted 4 baby blankets for friends.  It’s been a very welcome place of joy in a very strange 9 months.  I find that I fall in love with each piece over the course of its making.  This week, I’m sharing each of the 7 baby blankets I’ve ever made, here and on Instagram.  May it be a place of rest and joy for you, too, in this year we call 2020.

• Made: 2019
• Finished B.B. (before baby): YES!  Emphatically yes – the only one I ever delivered in person at an official baby shower.
• Relative difficulty & PITA: 3.5/10. My first time working a chevron/ripple pattern, and some embarrassing missteps with the border.  But I’d mellowed out since 2013 and it just wasn’t as big a deal.
• Pattern Used: Ripple Baby Blanket by Daisy Cottage Designs (also available on Etsy and Ravelry) with my own custom stripe pattern.
• Yarn Used: Lion Brand Feels Like Butta in Ice, Pale Gray and Charcoal

So much happened after 2013…none of it related to crochet.  As a small summary, those years included: getting into the best shape of my life (and then the worst); adopting a second cat (kitten) that my first cat hated, then making the horrible, impossible decision to euthanize him at 2 years old after a series of emergency interventions and surgery; job searching and job finding; moving to a new state; some of the most intense professional periods of my life; a car crash that put me in the hospital with vertigo (I do not recommend it)…

Yeah, I guess it’s not too surprising that hobbies like crocheting fell out of my life for a time.

I am quietly delighted that what drew me back was babies.

And here, a small word about babies.  I have never wanted any of my own.  This was so well known when I was a teenager and young adult that it became a sort of eye-rolling fun fact about me with friends and family.  Sureeeeee, they said, we’ll see how long that lasts after you’re married…  Well, I’m still not married at 41 (no subtext here, please), and with one exception* I have never, ever wanted children.  I do love babies and children, in doses.  I’m a happy time-share parent and honorary auntie to some very fabulous small humans.  But in this matter, I simply prefer to rent, rather than own.

So yeah, by 2019, I had enough mental space available to start noticing other people again.  As a rule, you can always find a friend or acquaintance who’s expecting if you look hard enough.  I found myself noticing the women in my life who were pregnant and thinking, I know what to do.  It was fun to play in yarn again.  I was, however, careful to give no indication to the mom-to-be of what I was doing, in case of failure or loss of interest.  I’m practical that way.

I liked the idea of a stripe, and since chevron/ripple is probably #2 in terms of most recognizable crochet patterns after granny squares, it was an easy choice.  Ripples are fast, easy, and distinctive.  Add to this the ability to customize with colors, width of stripes and so on – it was baby blanket nirvana.  This, I thought, was something I could do again.

Now, I do have to introduce one small wrinkle into all this bliss.  The border.  Well, shit.  I was ready to be done.  I didn’t feel like experimenting to figure out exactly how to stitch into the sides of the ripple rows.  So…at the edge of this clean little blankey is the most raggedy-looking line of border stitches.  It hurts my eyes.  It’s cringeworthy.  But, done is better than perfect.  *grits teeth* DONE IS BETTER THAN PERFECT.

All in all, this was a great little first jaunt back into baby blanket world.  I’m grateful to this little guy; if it hadn’t been so easy, so soft, so pretty and so fast, who knows if I would have kept going?  But don’t worry, because this is where things REALLY start to heat up.  Stay tuned for 2020, where it feels like everyone I know tells me they’re pregnant…the stuff of blankey dreams.

*Except for the horrible, body-snatching feeling I experienced in my mid-thirties as hormones went into overdrive and tried to convince me: BABY.  No, no, I politely explained, babies were not for me.  BUT BABY!!! the slavering beast insisted.  It was not a settling experience.