We had a bit of a fun surprise over the summer when a friend announced they were adopting a baby, with less than a month to go until the due date.
It’s never a good idea to spring a surprise baby on a knitter with short notice, but I was game to try whipping up my traditional gift of a knit baby blanket before baby arrived.
Of course he decided to come a little early, but the blanket was done in time for our first meeting, and hopefully will be getting a lot of use in the cooler months.
The design I came up with I called the Ozark Tweed Baby Blanket. It uses a three-color tweed stitch pattern from Barbara Walker and features a contrasting applied I-cord edging. My teenaged daughter picked out the colors — shades of blue and green with an orange border — based on the colors in baby’s room, and while I wasn’t sure about the orange, I really love it.
What I also love about this pattern is that it looks kind of complicated, and while it is a 12-row repeat it’s totally logical, and it’s really just four rows repeated using different colors. You carry the colors you’re not working with up the side, so it’s easy to see which color comes next, and every other row involves slipping half the stitches, so it’s faster than it looks. And it uses worsted weight yarn for speed and extra coziness.
I spent a lot of time watching the Olympics while working on this pattern, so I can confirm it’s good TV knitting once you get the hang of it.
And while I made it baby blanket sized (and have cast on numbers for different sizes of blankets you might want to make for little ones) it’s easy to adjust the pattern to any size you might like to make. All you need is an odd number of stitches.
You can grab the free pattern from my blog.
