There is a cradle, that has been used in my husband’s family for more than 100 years. It’s made of wood, with iron clad runners (?), so there has to be a mat under it to save the floor. It has been staying in our house since our children were small, and the youngest of them is almost 16… But eventually my husband’s sister is expecting a child, a girl, so now she will have to use and house the cradle until any of our sons need it. My husband wanted me to make a baby blanket to accompany the cradle, so I made one. I wanted it to be feminine without beeing girly.

It is made of a lot of pentagonal “roses” in two red and two pink shades. All of the roses have a yellow center. I started with a “belly button” of five stitches and knitted a few pounds of yellow, startting with a fex rounds of pi shaping, and after changing to red or pink yarn I made five increases every second round and different lacy patterns. When there was 520 stitches I transfered the stitches to waste yarn. When I had made (what I thought was) many enough of the roses, I joined them by 3NBO, and made diamonds in two shades of green where they were needed. I made an I-cord border around the (strangely shaped) blanket.

It is not possible to tile the plane with just regular pentagons, but it is possible with pentagons and rhombuses. When I searched the Internet, I found that my tesselation wasn’t unique - it had been used by Albrecht Dürer in 1525. http://ecademy.agnesscott.edu/~lriddle/ifs/pentagon/durer...