The Nursery Blanket

Hello,
It's been a hot day and this is my first post so please be patient with me.
Lots of people have been asking about my latest blanket - the Nursery Blanket - so I thought this was the time to try and finally start a blog in order to explain it.

Two weeks ago I asked my younger daughter what she would like to give her nursery teachers as a leaving present, she finishes next week as she is starting school after the summer. I had anticipated a card, or two and had expected chocolates or some such as her gift suggestion but NO. She announced that she wanted me to make a blanket for them to have in the family room as they didn't have any blankets in there are the moment. Our house is full of crochet blankets and she felt this was something that was lacking at nursery.

It was a lovely sentiment so I agreed, quickly thinking up simple and easy blankets I could quickly rattle up in the ten days I had to finish it. However little miss had other ideas and pointed to a blanket that lives in our house and said could I do something similar to it. This is the blanket she wanted me to replicate Lulu's rainbow blanket. This blanket is based on Bears rainbow blanket by the Purl Bee and the pattern can be found here Bears Rainbow Blanket

So Off we went upstairs to pick yarn, me quietly thinking at least she picked solid blocks of colour, that will be a bit easier. She picked some variegated Ice yarns, Ice magic Light to be exact, in eight different shades, two blues, green, yellow, orange pink, fuchsia and purple> I got mine direct from Ice Yarns in Turkey.

So I got started that evening. I am a working mum so my crochet is mainly restricted to evening once my girls are sleeping. I decided to do simple solid granny squares to give the blocks of colour she liked and estimated that I would need 8-10 squares in each colour to make a good sized blanket. I could write out the pattern for you, but it is available freely all across the internet and in pretty much any crochet book you care to pick up, a good tutorial I saw recently was by Wink of A Creative Being her description and photos are clear to follow so if you need help try this link.

It took five evenings of Solid crochet but I got all the blocks made and they looked lovely, it almost seemed a shame to do anything with them and we had lots of fun laying them out in different ways and admiring the colours 

Next we had to decide how to edge the squares, my daughter was pushing for black, but quite honestly my eyes we not up for it so we agreed on Stylecraft DK in Parchment, not to dark and not to bright, a colour that should enable the squares to be the focus. The next couple of nights were spent edging all 100 squares with a final round in parchment.

The next decision was how to lay them out to make a blanket, I had a few ideas of my own, however this was not a blanket of my design so I gave the squares to my daughters, explaining that their blanket had to be 8 squares across and 10 down and left them to it, we used a camera to record all their efforts 

As you can see they were at this job for quite some time and came up with many different layouts before deciding on the winner. my daughters favourite colour is purple so untimely she decided the heart of the blanket should be purple, and that the other colours should spread out from there. Next I had to join them. I did this by putting the squares right sides facing each other and did a slip stitch into the outside edge only of the treble crochets from the parchment row. They were all joined with a couple of days to spare so I quickly did a very simple edge, also in parchment. 

To do the border I did one round of half trebles, the next round I did htr, ch2 (skip two tr from previous round) her, all the way round. the next round I did 3htr in each 2ch space. And then it was done. a quick wash and it was ready to go

SO we parcelled it up and off to nursery we went, there is only one day a week Lulu's two favourite teachers are there so we had to take it then, and I think they liked it, when I left Lulu and her teacher were busy arranging it on a chair in the playroom, her teachers favourite colour is also purple so they were making sure its purple heart was right in the middle.

I hope you like it as much as we do

Kirsty