My older sister had an adorable baby girl!! This is actually my second niece (and a nephew is on the way!), but looking back at my posts I see that I didn't write one for the first niece's baby blanket...oops. So this is the first close family member blanket on this blog.
My usual rule of thumb is I make a baby blanket for each family, usually the first child. Since if I made one for every baby every friend had, I'd have way too long of a back log. However with my brothers, sisters, and in-laws that will definitely be different. So be prepared for more things for my family in the future, since we are entering that portion of our lives.
Anyway my older sister is an awesome artist (serious check out
her old DeviantArt account) and is really good with colors, :sigh: I always struggle. So I told my sister I was her baby blanket crochet printer, here are
my Pinterest boards,
my blog page with the blanket template, and
the usual yarn I use, go to town. She came back with this and a request for a monkey because it's the year of the monkey:
 |
| Monkey and blanket |
Honestly, I was a little surprised that she chose a pattern rather than use the blanket template. This ripple waves pattern is also pretty simple, the color change at every row is the only thing that makes this difficult because of so many ends to weave in! One on each end of every...single...row.
Main Info
Ripple Wave Blanket
Monkey
Thoughts from the process
After making both the blanket and the monkey I used up:
- Cotton Tail - 4.2 skeins
- Elephant - 2 skeins
- Sweetpea - 1.5 skeins
- Rosebud - 0.5 skein
- Goldfish - 0.5 skein
If the monkey had used a different color than white, I probably would not have needed the 5th skein at all. Though white is always good to have on hand, so it will do very well in my stash.
Blanket
This blanket is a 1.5 out of 5 in difficulty, without the frequent color changes. Keeping track of how the pattern goes up and down takes just enough concentration that if I was distracted I would make a mistake. With the color changes, the difficult increases to a 2.5. Not getting overwhelmed by the number of ends to weave in and knowing how to weave them in nicely takes patience and practice.
 |
| Ripple wave multi-color blanket |
Monkey
Since it was the year of the fire monkey, my sister also requested the monkey be flamed themed. At first she wanted a flame colored mohawk and tail tip, but I wasn't able to figure it out. So we went with this
embroidered flame on it's tummy instead, which also took a few tries and looking at flame icons/clipart.
 |
| Embroidered flame |
I love the arms! I've never had a pattern have me attach the arms this way, but it allows the arms to move! I will definitely consider this method for future stuffed animals
 |
| Monkey, arms regular position |
 |
| Monkey, arms in different position |
I have a confession, you know the cute half white tail there? It's not like that for artistic purposes, I ran out of grey yarn. I tried to make it work, but had to give up in the end. I unraveled it to about half of the tail and switched to white.
 |
| Half white monkey tail |
If I could do this monkey over again, I would stuff it much better. The head, the first piece I made, definitely doesn't have enough stuffing. Hopefully it'll hold up for a while. Maybe next time I visit my sister I'll bring some stuffing with me and borrow the monkey for a bit to see if I can fix it some more.
Comments
Post a Comment