My Welcome Home Blanket

The Welcome Blanket project is amazing, right? All those people pulling together to create something more than the sum of its parts.

I knit a Welcome Blanket last year, and I also knit a Welcome Blanket for myself. I guess you could call it a Welcome Home Blanket. (Too punny? I’m not sorry!) I started my blanket before the official Welcome Blanket, and put it aside while I was working on that. From start to finish, my Welcome Home blanket took maybe six months of train knitting, TV knitting, and travel knitting.

The pattern is super simple, but of course I still worked a variation of it – I slipped the first stitch of every row, and increased to a total of 50 stitches. This gave me squares of 14 cm along the an edge when blocked. It was a little tough working in fine yarn – those middle rows felt loooong. But it’s nice and light and cozy – perfect.

And because it’s so super-simple, I didn’t need to carry a pattern.

My Welcome Blanket was knit out of a lot of Drops Baby Merino I found in my stash. I have no memory of buying this – maybe I was planning a sweater for my niece? I do remember trying (and failing) to swatch out a pattern, which I may have intended for this yarn. It was not to be though – and now I have a lovely blanket instead.

The colours were worked at random. I tried to work each colour with each other colour. This argualby lead to some questionable combinations, but that’s part of the fun!

And the pattern of the squares? That wasn’t random. I spent about an hour (okay – an episode of Mindhunter on Netflix) arranging and rearranging them, looking at instagram for inspiration, and asking my husband for his opinion, before settling on this one in its stripy, triangular glory. It was a bit of a challenge because of the randomness of the colours. A couple of really lovely patterns almost worked, but it seemed I was short one square in the right combination of colours. I’m very happy with how it turned out though!

I used around 460 grams of yarn to work this up. The boarder is a simple round of double crochet, then another of half-doubles – I hesitated for a bit before adding a border, but I feel it draws everything together! The squares are just whipstitched (sewed) together. I’d deliberately left long tails, so this was also the ends-weaving-in process (so efficient!). I think I only had to cut one new piece of yarn to close a single gap.

Here it is in the same place as my original Welcome Blanket (which has gone to live at the Smart Museum, or maybe in someone’s house by now?). You can really see the difference in scale. Also I got a new plant.

This blanket lives over the edge of the couch, where it’s used for snuggling under in the evenings. Our flat is on the cool side – only two of our radiators work, and we’re working up the courage to call the reggie, who will probably tell us to try the sames things we’ve already tried. In German. And then one of us will have to take a day off work, and try and make small talk in French… It seems easier just to snuggle up in blankets. Maybe that coolness is inspiring my current blanket obsession?

Whatever the reason, I am really digging blankets at the moment – which is lucky, because I have a plan to cast on a new one…