Ready for Number 2

I know that I'll be confused about what day it is for the rest of this week, but I am very glad to have had yesterday as a bonus day off. Working from home takes away some of the stress and depression of Sunday night, but when you get home from a trip Sunday afternoon and have all the weekend chores and errands to run in a matter of hours, it's nice to have a bonus day before you have to get back to the daily grind. And it's always nice to be able to sleep in on a Monday morning!

One other thing the extra day off allowed me to do was finish up my nephew's blanket, in plenty of time for his second birthday!

It's on our queen-sized bed here, for scale.

I made this blanket using the corner-to-corner (C2C) method of crochet. It's a pretty simple concept in which you work on the diagonal and add blocks of double crochet stitches perpendicular to the previous row -- kind of like entrelac in knitting. There are ways to use the method to create designs/images by changing yarn and colors, but I stuck with simple stripes. My plan was to work with each color until it looked like I didn't have enough left to work another row, then join the next color. Once I had used all the colors, I started decreasing and mirrored the colors for the second half to create a square.

The yarn is Mission Falls 1824 Cotton, a yarn that was discontinued many years ago and that I bought on clearance at my former LYS, I think when I was pregnant with Rainbow, because I had it in my stash with a printed copy of a baby sweater that I think I'd intended to knit with it. I don't remember if I bought all the yarn they had left, but it sure seems like it given that I had 17 skeins of it. I used a bit more than 12 skeins in the blanket; in addition to the leftovers, which varied in amount by color, I somehow missed the two skeins of a more pinky purple when I was deciding on the order of colors, so I have two full skeins of that remaining. 

The colors actually used in the blanket are Truffle (dark brown), Goldenrod (yellow), Moss and Lichen (greens), Aubergine and Phlox (purples), and Graphite (dark blue/gray). I had two skeins of each color except Truffle, of which I had three, so I used some of the third skein to add a round of single crochet around the whole blanket when it was finished. In all, I used 1,018 yards -- and that's quite a chunk of yarn taken out of my stash! It weighs 606 grams, which is pretty heavy but not surprising given that it's a cotton yarn. The leftovers will likely become some washcloths.

I still need to wash the blanket, so it may shrink a bit, but the finished dimensions at the moment are approximately 32 by 32 inches. I used a size G/4.0 mm crochet hook, and I can't tell you what my gauge is (I really don't know how to measure it with this method because the stitches are in different directions), but it's fairly dense. My nephew's birthday is the beginning of next month, so I will wash it and wrap it up so it's ready to go. Finishing the blanket nearly a month early means that there's still time to make him a little amigurumi friend to go with it, too! And baby knitting will start soon -- my brother- and sister-in-law will find out the sex of baby number 2 tomorrow!