The blanket that was ready before the baby

An overly ambitious scrap-busting project featuring a ridiculous number of colours and some very questionable time management.

Somewhere during maternity leave, after moving house and prior to giving birth, I decided it would be a good idea to make a blanket for the baby. Preferably using up some of the ridiculous amount of leftover yarn I had lying around in the process.

Simple enough, right?

I’d been wanting to make something colourful, and a baby blanket seemed like the perfect excuse to throw together all those leftover balls of yarn that weren’t quite enough for a project of their own. I decided on moss stitch, picked out a whole bunch of colours and figured I’d let chance decide which one came next.

The idea was to make a random colour blanket. No carefully planned stripes, no repeating colour sequence. Just a slightly chaotic collection of whatever colours I had available.

What I hadn’t really considered was that using lots of different colours isn’t necessarily the same thing as using up lots of yarn.

In fact, I managed to involve a frankly ridiculous number of colours without making much of a dent in my stash. Every time I picked up another ball, I’d use a little bit of it and put it right back. By the end, I had a very colourful blanket and almost as many leftover balls of yarn as I’d started with.

Not exactly the stash-busting success I’d imagined.

A self-imposed deadline

Somewhere along the way, I decided the blanket absolutely had to be finished before the baby arrived.I’m not entirely sure why. It’s not like newborns have particularly strong opinions about their bedding, and there was certainly no shortage of other blankets in the house. But once I’d got it into my head that this one needed to be ready, that was that.

As my due date got closer, my crocheting became increasingly frantic. I’d sit working on row after row, determined to get just a little further before putting it down. And then another row. And probably another one after that.

At some point, my wrist started hurting. Gotta love that RSI. A sensible person might have taken that as a sign to give it a rest. I took it as a sign that I needed to hurry up.

And after all that rushing?

My baby girl didn’t arrive until the 41 weeks mark. I could have taken my sweet time.

A blanket with a home

I still have plenty of leftover yarn, so I can’t claim the project achieved what I originally set out to do. But I do love how it turned out. And given how much time I spent worrying about finishing it before she arrived, there’s something quite funny about seeing it casually lying in her playpen now, as if it hadn’t once been the subject of a very unnecessary race against the clock.