Log Cabin Baby Blanket: November 2006 Archives
I've mentioned on several occasions that I don't knit for babies. Babies are really too young to appreciate hand knit gifts. I do, on the other hand, knit for their mothers if they are special friends and I think they would appreciate it. Some people like hand made things, some do not. I try to match the gift with the friend.
I have a very special knitting friend who's baby is due in in April. I'd been trying to think of the right thing to do for her since I found out she was pregnant. Nothing really struck me until I saw Cara's finished Log Cabin Blanket. It seemed like a perfect idea. Stylish, handmade and something that I could try playing with color on. Made even better by the fact that I could make it out of machine washable yarn. It seems to me a bit of a cruel thing to give a new mom a hand-wash only baby blanket. So I took a trip out to the Fold to look for some good colors.
At the time, I didn't know the sex of the baby, and my friend hadn't started on the nursery, so I wanted to pick relatively gender neutral colors. When Toni pulled out that Stonewash (it is so much faded denimy goodness and the photo doesn't enitrely do it justice) I knew that was the color I wanted to start with. Somehow, the other two colors were the ones that I thought just needed to be part of the assembly.
Since then, I've been thinking about what kind of blanket pattern I want to construct. Cara's blanket is beautiful, but I wanted to use the opportunity to be come up with my own creative ideas. I looked around at the web a bit and even found a cool tool to help me experiment. But in the end, Excel turned out to be the best tool. Here are a few of the ideas I came up with:
Except the first one, they're all pretty much based on existing traditional patterns (the first one could be, too, for all I know... there's so little new under the sun when it comes to quilting). They would all end up being about the same size (about 3' x 4' or 3' x 3'), I'll just alter the starting sizes of the center square to get where I need to go. Since I only have 2 skeins of each color yarn, I wanted to be as color balanced as possible, which may mean that Design #2 is not entirely an option. The idea behind the images in Design 4 was to see a couple of different wave color permuatations and also to see what happened when it became a 3 block by 4 block blanket instead of a 3 block by 3 block blanket.
My current favorite is the first design, but I don't know if I will have the stamina for 20 blocks, and I am a bit worried that it is a little too abstract for a baby blanket. At any rate, you know this is the part where I open it up to get other opinions. Which one do you like best? If it was going to be for your baby's room, which one would you pick? Or should I consider going back to the drawing board altogether?
