LOOMED KNIT BABY STROLLER BLANKET.

Yay! – I’ve just finished this baby stroller blanket. 

There is something exciting about creating a gift to celebrate a baby’s birth. Of course, in this case it is even more special. The baby is being welcomed as a new addition to our own family – for me: grandchild number four, grandson number two. So, it was a joy to knit a gift for him. He was born last weekend - healthy but a couple of weeks early - and that's my excuse for not having sent it off yet. The mailing will be done ASAP.

In my mind, every baby needs a special baby blanket, something that's all their own. I not only believe this now but always have. So, along with my sons and grand kids, that makes six knitted baby blankets that I've made over my lifetime.  Oh! I also have made  blankets as gifts for other babies, but most of those tend to be made of soft material with a crocheted edge. Nice, but not so much work went into them.

Did I follow a specific pattern so I would know how big the blanket will turn out?  Turns out that I didn’t. I winged it. The result was a cover about 40 inches long and 28 inches wide - big enough to classify as a stroller blanket from what I've seen on the Internet.

The style, I hope, is trendy and chic – a colorful striped pattern that can grow with baby instead of seeming “babyish.”

The yarn is an acrylic – the better for frequent washing - of medium weight, doubled. It’s made of white yarn – along with four bright colors (red, green, blue and yellow).  I pulled out the long green loom that I’ve been using for the past five years.

You can might guess from the photo, the cover was knitted as a flat panel.  I e-wrapped the pegs all the way down, around and across the back side of the loom, including all the pegs except one at the end. 

The pattern was unusual.  It was knitted in a single piece,  consisting of a series of colored stripes -  that were all to be three rows wide. The white spaces between each of the stripes were to be 6, along with 8 white rows on each end. The reality was that I lost count – several times - and the stripes turned out to be a bit irregular. But I did manage to keep the order of the colors that I planned and the slight irregularity makes it look nicer - a bit like homespun – or at least I think so.

Easy to make loomed knit baby blanket.

The upside to this kind of knitting? It's really easy. You are basically e-wrapping and knitting over the whole thing. Total time was about 20 hours – done leisurely over four weeks.

Was there any down side on the loom knitting? Not so much. Other than a slight shrinkage that had to do with yarn wrap tension and the cast-on edge rolled a little. Again, I wasn't concerned as I knew beforehand about these limitations and planned to add a border all around to finish it off. It was really no problem to do the half-double crochet edge that gave a more finished look.  Another down side of loom knitting came from an obvious right side and a  less finished looking backside. But, now that it’s completed, the backside seems O.K.

Reminiscing now: my sons (now fathers, themselves) really loved their handmade knitted blankets.  In the toddler years, they carried around their "blankies" as a comfort when taking a nap or settling down to bed at night. Unfortunately, those blankets are long gone. So many years have passed. 

Each of the three older grand kids also had their own soft, handmade baby blanket.  But the grand kids are all still young and I suppose that their newborn blankets are being kept somewhere - or better yet, have been passed on to other family additions.

For now, I hope that my daughter-in-law will remember this blanket and tuck it around the baby in the stroller on cool/cold mornings.  When he doesn’t need it for outside use, it can be folded in half and placed on the foot of his bed. Of course, I realize that he will have many lovely blankets, but I bet only a very few of them (or, possibly, none of the others) were made specially for him.