Crocheted Baby Blankets

On her blog The Old Fashioned Baby, Jeannie Baumeister recently had a two part post about her friend Miss Carole's Crocheted Baby Blankets. I saw this, was enchanted with the idea and rushed right out to gather the supplies to make my own. Above are the fabrics I found, the left is from Joann's, the right from a local quilt shop which is going out of business. I had some flannel yardage and scraps but decided to buy more as my family has a couple of babies ready to be born sometime in July and September.

 I found a scrap of pretty pink flannel with white hearts that was big enough to make a burp cloth. Here it is from the shop, don't you just hate it when the fabric is cut with such ragged edges? And this was from a relatively nice quilt shop, but also gone out of business. 

I managed to cut a 11 by 21 inch rectangle and rounded the edges using a circle tool. This is about six inches in diameter. I then proceeded to make the holes in the fabric edge using an old wing needle and no thread. After several false starts with the machine angrily beeping at me I realized I had to have a bobbin in the bobbin case to be able to stitch more than three stitches without any thread in the needle.  I then proceeded to try to crochet into the holes but found that the holes kept closing up and I couldn't get the hook into them.

So to the ironing board I went, and gave the edges a good dose of spray starch, and ironed it till dry.

The starched fabric seemed to take the stitching much better, but I decided to mark the holes just in case they tried to close up again. The blue marks plus the larger holes made by the fabric pen helped to keep the holes from closing.  I used a stitch length of 4.0, and kept the edge of the fabric in line with the edge of the presser foot, which made the holes about 3/8 inch (10 mm)away from the fabric edge.

So here I am crocheting away. I used bedspread weight cotton thread, which is size 10, and a steel crochet hook size 7, or 1.65 mm.  After crocheting the first row in white, I added a second row of single crochet in pink, then the scallops in white. I made the scallops with three double crochet in one loop, skip a loop, single crochet, skip, then the three double crochet again.

And here's the finished product! I found that the scallop patter I used was just a bit tight around the rounded corners, even though my tension was pretty loose. But this does make for a good practice piece, and best of all, it kept my mind off the Chinese Flower project for a few days. Next I'll make a full size 41 inch square blanket using the Joann's fabric and an ecru/pink thread combination. I did order some DMC Cebelia Cotton thread size 20 in several colors so I'll try that out on the other flannel (right hand side in the first photo).

Thanks to Jeannie and Miss Carole for their instructions!