When I found out my nephew was having his 2nd baby, I began to think of making a baby blanket as a gift. So, I began to search around for the yarn and stitch pattern for the blanket.

I remembered working with Caron Cotton Cakes yarn and loved how it felt. Since the yarn was a cotton mix, it would be easy for busy parents to care for it. We knew it would be a girl so, I went to look for the Mauve color. I already had some in that color, I just needed some more cakes for the blanket. Unfortunately, I found out that they no longer make the yarn in solid colors. Nevertheless, I was able to find a substitute color, Sunset Dreams, which included 2 main colors of my nephew’s wedding.

The Sunset Dreams color leaned my thinking toward the C2C stitch pattern. However, it has been a while since I worked with this pattern; I forgot how to start it. While searching on YouTube, I found a tutorial of a blanket made with the same yarn. Maria’s Blue Crayon made the c2c pattern with hdc rather than the traditional dc. She did it so in order to minimize the gaps between the dc stitches. Yes, I could achieve the same by using a smaller hook size but using the hdc yielded a thicker fabric. So, that was the pattern I made for this baby blanket.

The border was done in solid color, Mauve, which I happened to have some leftover from a previous project. As for the pattern of the border, it was taken from the book “Around the Corner Crochet Border” by Edie Eckman. It was pattern #25, page 72. To match with the blanket pattern, I replaced the dc with hdc. Hook size used: 4.0 mm

I then added January Flowers by Ali Crafts and Leaf appliques to one of the corners of the baby blanket. I chose the January Flower pattern because it resembles a peach blossom (Asian culture). Since peach blossoms have 5 petals rather than 6 from the pattern, I cut back the stitch count to make the flower with 5 petals. The yarns I used for the appliques were I Love This Cotton from Hobby Lobby, in colors of Rosy and Sage. I used hook size 3.5 mm.