This Sweet Gemma was supposed to be a Christmas present for my Troll Princess. She's not a baby, but they do have nap times at the daycare, and she doesn't have a blanket there, so when I saw this lovely baby blanket design by Triona Murphy I knew that I wanted to knit it for her.
Pattern: Sweet Gemma by Triona Murphy
Yarn: Novita Wool (254 yellow and 750 purple), 274 g total
Needles: 3,5 mm (US 4)
Anything going to the daycare needs to be something you can just throw into the washer when it comes back. I also wanted this blanket to be something she can play with, so I dug into my stash to see if there's enough of any machine washable yarn to work with. Troll Princess loves to build play houses with blankets and pillows, and I have told her that she's not allowed to use my Frida's Flowers blanket or my Paintbox Log Cabin blanket in her play. I feel bad about it, but the former is the biggest crochet project I have ever done, and the latter is hand painted silk yarn, so I don't want either one of them ruined in play. This one is now a blanket for her and she's allowed to play with it as much as she wants!
I found these Novita Wool leftovers in my stash. The yellow I used for the vest for Business woman last Christmas, and the purple was used in a lace pullover for her. I managed to make her believe that I had unraveled her garments to make the blanket, and she got pretty upset so in the end I had to tell her that I had just enough leftovers for the blanket. Or, almost enough. I weighed the yarn beforehand, knitted one square and realised that I have enough of both colors to make 4,6 squares. Now, you need 4 and 5, so it didn't quite add up, but I decided to think about it later and just knitted 7 squares to start with. At that point I noticed that there's more purple than yellow, and I also remembered that the Paintbox Log Cabin blanket pieces were attached with three needle bind off instead of binding off each piece separately and then crocheting them together. So I unraveled the bind off and went with three needle bind off instead. That allowed me to use yellow for the bind off and use the little strands unraveled from the purple squares to almost finish the 5th purple square. Don't tell anyone there's half a round missing from one square! You can only imagine the amount of ends to weave in...
To make the blanket a tad larger, I used the remaining yellow to knit a border around the blanket. With the border the blanket is 80 x 80 cm (31 x 31 inches), so it's not really big enough for a 5-year-old. I didn't manage to have the blanket done by Christmas, but Troll Princess' name day is after Christmas, so I told her that it was her name day gift. "This is the best name day gift I have ever received!" was the verdict, although it might also be the only name day gift she's ever received.
This is the only Indie Design Gift-A-Long project that I managed to finish on time, but I'm glad I got one project done. There are two more coming, but not within the GAL, unfortunately.
