I finished something!

We had a lovely Christmas week last week. We got to spend some time with different family members throughout the week and got to see a few friends. It was lovely. Chris made a wonderful Christmas dinner for me and Mom and we're still consuming some of the leftovers. In between I made a lot of progress on my last Christmas gift and might even finish today and I finally got back to doing some crochet in the evenings.

I had to take a crochet break for several weeks because the joints in my left hand became very inflamed from likely Lyme disease. Three weeks of anitbiotics seems to have fixed my hand and now I'm trying to replenish the microbes that the antibiotics destroyed. Nothing is ever "all good" is it? Everything is a tradeoff. This tradeoff allowed me to pick up my crochet hook again and finally finish off this blanet.

The inspiration for this blanket came from Mary. I had purchased some of this Mandala Ombre yarn and I loved how her blanket looked using the same yarn. The stitch is called linen stitch or seed stitch and if you go to her post you will see links to tutorials for doing the stitch. But it's simply alternating single crochet and chain. The single crochet is done over the chain of the previous row. The color that I used is called Balance. I absolutely love this yarn. I think it's my favorite so far. It is soooo soft and so easy to work with. It does make a heavier blanket but it feels fabulous.

I chained 141 stitches and kept going until I had used up 3 balls. For these blankets I don't shoot for a specific size. My goal is to have no leftover yarn.

After I finished the 3 balls I had a width and length proportion that I liked but I also had an extra ball of yarn. I decided to simply use the extra ball as a border and after searching for border ideas for about an hour, I decided that continuing with the linen stitch would be best and I love the effect.

The blanket ended up being about 34 x 40" using 4 balls of the Mandala Ombre. I thin that's a pretty perfect baby blanket size.

This picture give you a better idea of how the color changes in the yarn. That one skinny purple row at the bottom is the first row of the border. I tried to make sure that the border color wasn't the same as the top or bottom rows.

That's my 14th crochet blanket this year. I'm really surprised that I made so many. I think they have mostly been donated to a local women's shelter and I hope that they have made people happy.