Butterflies everywhere!

A friend with three boys finally had a little girl. So I decided I'd design as girly a blanket as possible for her. This pink blanket with purple butterflies is the result.

Pink baby blanket with purple butterflies

To match the butterfly theme I also made butterfly barrettes and threw in a pink owl I made a while ago. I got the pink rabbit basket below at Target during the Easter sales.

Main Info

• Size: 2' 4" x 2' 4"
• Time Blanket: 23.25 hours
• Time Butterfly Barrettes: 3.75 hours
• Yarn: Lion Brand Yarns - Pound of Love
• Pink
• Lavender
• White
• Pattern: From Lion brand originally, now also here on my blog

Pink butterfly baby blanket pattern

Thoughts from the process

All five butterflies in this pattern are different. I did this on purpose and while I like how they came out, I definitely would do things differently next time.

First I regret breaking my rule of requiring any color to at least be four diamonds, forming a diamond. I had this rule for two reasons. It is easier to crochet the stitch that way, so there is less color swapping, and the color is easier to see. The antenna for two of the butterflies and the bodies of the other three are all a single strand of diamonds. These are all a little hard to see and carrying the yarn over to the necessary diamonds made the stitches look more bulky than they should.

These two butterflies below especially have bulky stitches for their body. Weaving in the ends afterwards didn't help.

Carrying up the yarn past a row for this butterfly was difficult and doesn't look smooth. You can see the yarn crossing the rows between the three stitches.

This butterfly I really liked on the pattern, but the antenna look funny. This is because I use a diamond grid to plan the color pattern, but the blanket stitch itself is more of a scale pattern. So the diamonds aren't crisp, but smoothed at the top. This scale instead of diamond pattern, also meant the wings look a little stretched out because the top row of diamonds aren't as sharp of a point.

The best butterfly was this one. And among all of them, I'll probably reuse this one if I ever have a blanket that calls for a butterfly. While the antenna are a single row, they didn't come out as badly as the bodies of the smaller butterflies.

My next change would be to not use white as the body of the butterflies. The white butterfly bodies are actually harder to see in real life than the pictures. They blend in some what with the pink and the purple overpowers the white bit. Instead I'd use a dark colored yarn for the body, so the color has a more equal or even greater visual weight than the wings.

After I made the blanket I wanted to continue the butterfly theme, but wasn't satisfied with any of the amigurumi butterfly patterns I found. When I found a simple pattern to make butterflies here on Pinterest, I immediately thought barrettes, which are prefect for a little girl! I made a set of six, all combinations of the three colors I used for the blanket.

 

The pink owl in the basket, as I said earlier, is one I made a while ago. The pattern is the same as I did for this commission. The eyes are pink embroidery thread.

And that's the whole set. When I gave it to her she loved all of it instantly and mentioned she finally understands all the mom's with little girls that they constantly dress up. So the barrettes will come in handy for her :)