Ruthless Knitting Archive

People seem to love to knit blankets for babies. I myself have knit one baby blanket, and I more or less enjoyed the process. But it is a long process, and it’s hard for me to imagine taking on another baby blanket any time soon, especially as a baby shower gift.

Perhaps others agree with me that the baby blanket is a rather large commitment for a gift, since knitters always seem to be looking for the next big thing in baby shower gifts.

I may have found it. I present to you the Carseat Blanket.

The idea for the Carseat Blanket came to me when my friend Rebecca was kind enough to tote her newborn infant to my house along with gobs of maternity clothes that she no longer needed and had carefully selected to suit my personal taste. (Thanks, Rebecca!) While her daughter Madelyn was lounging on the floor in her carseat –

(perhaps you wish to see a picture of Madelyn wearing the dress I knit for her? yes?) 

– while this specimen of chubby baby cuteness was lounging in her carseat on the floor, I noticed how very small the infant carseat is, and I thought, "Man, you don’t really need much of a blanket to cover up such a little baby!" Indeed, the bigger the blanket is, the more you have to fold it and tuck it out of the way so it doesn’t drag on the floor while you carry that stupid behemoth carseat around.

What the parents of a newborn really need, I decided, is an itty-bitty blanket. A blanket just big enough, say, for Leona. A blanket about two feet square. Voila!

The Carseat Blanket is the perfect project for the overworked knitting enthusiast and/or slightly weary pregnant knitter, since it can be knocked out in four or five hours of knitting time, tops, on biggish needles. It is also a good project for the lazy knitter, since you can cast on as many stitches as it seems might be appropriate, knit the middle part, and then just keep cranking out that edging until you run out of yarn. If you cast on too few stitches, so what? Your edging will just be wider and therefore cuter. Too many stitches? You’ll have a narrower edging, but it won’t matter, because rose stitch doesn’t require a border to lay flat in any event.

Can you tell that I’m inordinately pleased with myself?

Pattern: My own.

Size: 22.5 x 23.5 inches

Yarn: Aslan Trends Guanaco (60 percent alpaca, 40 percent merino wool; 145 yds per 100 g skein) in blue jeans and papaya

Source: Loopy Yarns, Chicago, IL

Needles: US 11 (8.0 mm) circular needles

Gauge: About 11 stitches over 4" in both rose and garter stitch

Notes: Rose stitch is one of my very favorite stitches. It’s much simpler than it looks: on the front side, you knit one into the stitch below, then purl one, and repeat these two actions all the way across. On the back side, you knit all the stitches. Then on the next right-side row, you offset by one stitch. If you want striped rose stitch, you change colors every other row. Through some bit of knitting alchemy, it ends up looking like this. Easy peasy, and it spreads like all get-out. The body of this blanket only has 40 stitches across (for about 18 inches of the width) and is about 90 rows tall, so it didn’t take much longer to knit than a little 40-stitch swatch would have.

On a negative note, I feel obliged to say that I only sort of liked the Guanaco yarn that I used for this project. I really enjoyed the colors (which David picked out), but the texture is a little problematic. According to the Ravelry page for the yarn, it is billed as "snuggly bulky soft Alpaca wool." "Just touch it and you will love it forever," the company urges, since it is "specially designed for softness and comfort."

I hate to rain on Aslan Trends’ parade, but if you want alpaca/merino yarn to be soft, you have to remove the guard hairs from the alpaca. Otherwise, you will have a very soft base yarn that is bristling with, well, bristles. It’s acceptable for an outer layer, but I wouldn’t want it against my skin, and I sure as heck wouldn’t put it directly on a baby’s skin. Maybe I just got a bad batch?

At any rate, this was such a simple and fun project that I’m thinking of making another in a solid color. I have two skeins of red cotton yarn that need a purpose. Anyone interested in the pattern for this? I could probably refine it in the next go-round and write it up for public consumption without too much difficulty.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 23rd, 2008 at 3:27 pm and is filed under Design, Finished Objects. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.