Tuesday, February 25, 2014

Blue Stripes Blanket

Living far from family has its challenges, so I'm grateful to the people in my church who have helped me out and included me in their family events.  I decided to surprise three of these families with an afghan for Christmas.

For this blanket, I knew that I wanted to use navy because I knew that would go with their decor, but I had some trouble picking a second color.  I finally settled on using a lighter shade of blue.  When I went through the first book of 30 stitches, I had two favorite stitches: 1 and 13.  For this afghan I used stitch 13.  It's a very fast stitch that looks much more complicated than it really is.  The color pattern is basically a large block of navy, then three stripes of light blue repeated.

Color Pattern:
16 rows of navy, (2 rows light blue, 2 rows navy, 2 rows light blue, 2 rows navy, 2 rows light blue, 16 rows navy) repeated

Pattern:
Chain 182, then work stitch 13 following color pattern until satisfied with length.  For me this was four sets of stripes.  Then add this border:
Round 1: sc around, 3 sc in corner (navy)
Round 2: dc around, 5 dc in corner (navy)
Round 3: sc around, 3 sc in corner (navy)
Round 4: sc around, 3 sc in corner (pale denim)

Round 5: sc around, 3 sc in corner (navy)
Round 6: dc around, 5 dc in corner (navy)
Round 7: sc around, 3 sc in corner (navy)

I made this in I Love this Yarn in Navy and Pale Denim with a J hook.

Christmas Gifts

This year I gave five blankets as Christmas gifts, which was a little bit crazy.  Each blanket deserves its own post, and those will be forthcoming.  Stay tuned.