Baby Olive

What a fun afghan! I was looking to make a baby blanket and wanted something a little different from the norm. I was flicking through Larissa Brown's 'Knitalong' book (love this book - made quite a few projects from it) when I came across 'Olive's Afghan'. The interesting zig zag lines and simple garter stitch called to me.



I had quite a lot of the Rowan 4-ply left in my stash from another baby blanket, and since it has held up really well to numerous cycles in the washing machine I decided it would be perfect for this project. So instead of the yarn and needle called for in the pattern, I used the Rowan 4-ply and a US 3 needle. I didn't make any changes to the number of stitches that the pattern recommends you cast on for each panel, but did only knit 12 stripes per panel. This seemed to be a good size for a baby blanket - it is about the width of a standard crib/cot.

I found that I only needed 6 panels to make the baby blanket (which was a good thing as, although I love the Rowan 4-ply cotton, I find it unforgiving on my hands - after a good stint of knitting I feel like I have achey claws instead of young, supple hands! Aah the scarifices ha ha!)



To finish, I placed right sides of the panels together and joined them using whip stitch in a nice contrasting steel blue colour. I chose the whip stitch because I wanted it to be a little visible, but not overly dominant (as a crochet join might be). And then of course added a crochet border in the steel blue (I seem to have this thing for adding crochet borders to all my blankets these days!) It is about 5 rounds of double crochet. At each point I'd dc 3 stitches into 1 hole, and at each trough I joined 3 stitches into 1. (I'm sure there's a correct way of describing this, but I'm not familiar with the crochet lingo!)

And that's about it. Oh it does have a 'design feature' - I ran out of the pale green yarn on the very last stripe in one of the panels, and ended up using one of the other colours from the blanket. I think it works out ok. In fact if it hadn't been one of the last panels I knit, I would have considered purposely adding an 'odd' stripe into each of the panels for a fun touch.



I'm pleased with how this turned out. But perhaps the biggest fan of the project is our big boy Bruno who would actively seek out this project and then take it on tours of the house, garage and dog run, leaving a Hansel and Gretal style trail of yarn everywhere! Yep, the end result had a good spin in the washing machine before being gifted!