SO when I found out that my friend was pregnant, I immediately started thinking about what I could make for her kid…I’ve never knitted much more than scarves and the like, but I decided to make it (yet ungendered) a blanket. I used some graph paper to make a pattern for the blanket, scaling it down to 2” for every square.
Here is where I had a problem: I was just using spare skeins of yarn that I had been given over the years and I didn’t anticipate such a dramatic disparity between the gauges of the skeins. A 4”x4” square was not going to be 20 stitches across for every type of yarn. This is obvious in retrospect. Because I’m still a noob and also didn’t want to backtrack and make gauge swatches for every skein I was using, I decided to pretend that they were all the same and measure by stitch instead of actual size.
Clearly, this didn’t work. When I had all the pieces done (months and months later), they didn’t fit together like puzzle pieces as the graph paper would suggest. I had to fix this.
I sewed the pieces together the way they SHOULD look, which made it look normal from the front and terrible from the back – the extra tops and sides of too-big squares flopped over with nowhere to go. To fix this new problem, I bought the softest fabric (well, the cheapest soft stuff) that I could find and sewed that onto the back. Now it’s super warm! That was totally intentional!
So anyway…IT’S a girl! Which is good because the blanket features a pink heart. I think it was a successful first attempt, but there are a lot of things I would change if (when) I do this again.
Moral of the story: don’t be dumb. There’s a reason you’re supposed to measure these things.
2nd moral of the story: if you’re clever enough you don’t have to measure! (just kidding, it’s not worth the hassle)
In the future I’m gonna take progress pictures instead of just a final product, that might be fun. But in the meantime, here’s the final product, also featuring baby Victoria!
Front:
Back:
V for Victoria:
SQUEEEE!
