Inspired by: Geometric Heart Baby Blanket
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I finally finished one of my long term crochet wip's (work in progress) a geometric heart baby blanket.
This blanket was inspired by a very talented and inspirational crocheter Celine from by Crafty CC. I follow Celine on instagram and last October I saw this lovely little geometric heart and saved it (I LOVE the save function on IG) .
When I found out some friends were expecting a baby I knew I wanted to try a scaled up version of Celine's little heart.
To make a crocheted geometric heart baby blanket like mine you will need:
4 x 100g ball of cotton or cotton blend DK yarn in your choice of 4 different colours (1 ball of each)
2 x 200g ball of cotton or cotton blend DK yarn in your choice of 2 different colours (again, 1 ball of each - these are for the border, you'll need a little more than 100g in 2 of the colours if you want to add the shell border)
1 x 200g ball of cotton blend DK yarn in white or cream
4mm crochet hook
The quantities I've put are should be plenty I think. I had a little let over of all the colours = excpet the cream, I used every scrap of that. However, I had to buy all but 2 of my colours in 200g balls to get the colours I wanted so I had quite a bit left over - don't worry I've been putting it to good use - you can see some leftover used in my Granny Square Pencil case and I'll share what else I've made soon.
Decide on an arrangement of your colours that you are happy with, then start making the appropriate coloured squares. By Crafty CC has an excellent tutorial on how to make the half and half squares here. Note that Celine writes her patterns in US crochet terms.
You need 14 squares that are the half and half colour to make up the heart and 22 plain white or cream squares. Once they are sewn together you can start a border.
For my border I did rows of Treble Crochet (that's Double Crochet for those of you working in US terms) Just one Treble in each stitch. I'm afraid I didn't count so I have no idea how many stitches I had.
After 2 rounds of each colour, so 12 rounds in all, I had nearly run out of the yarn colours where I had only the 100g balls, so I stopped the rows of trebles and did a very simple shell edging using 2 colours which I had more of.
To do a shell edging you simple work a Double Crochet (Single Crochet in US terms), skip 2 stitches then work 6 double trebles (that's Trebles in US terms) into the next stitch. Skip 2 stitches and work a Double Crochet (Single Crochet in US terms) and then repeat again with the skip 2, 6 Double Trebles etc until you get to the corner.
As you near the corner count stop and count how many stitches you have to work into. You may ned to fudge it a little and make the shells a little larger by skipping 3 stitches at some point to make it work. I worked mine out so I was working a Double Crochet into the corner stitches. I didn't take a good photo of this I'm afraid and now I can't as I've already gifted the blanket! You can see in this slightly fuzzy blown up photo what I mean though. You can see some of the shells are stretching just a little further than others.
I finished the whole thing off with a round of Double Crochet (again that's SC if you are in the US) in the purple.
In the photos the orange and the watermelon colour look much more similar than they do in real life. Actually I found in the daylight they look different and in artificial light in the evenings they look more similar. Weird but not a massive issue!
To gift it I just rolled it up and added a pretty ribbon tie.
This blanket finished up being approx 32" square, that's 81cm so it's not a massive blanket. Perfect for a wrapping a brand new baby, ideal for tucking over a bigger babies legs in the pushchair on a cold day or laying over them when they fall asleep on the sofa.
These bright colours are fun but this blanket would look lovely in soft pastel shades too I think.
Another variation would be to do lots more of the squares in the plain colour instead of the striped border that I did. You could just keep going until the blanket was the size you want. Or you could make 4 of the heart blocks and join them to make a bigger blanket. Oh the possibilities!!
I'll be sharing this at these link ups
