Baby blanket Ta-dah

I was so pleased to getting round to finishing making Mrs.W's baby blanket this past weekend. Mrs.W is one of Alice's year 6 teacher's whom she adores. She is off on her maternity leave today and we wanted to thank her in a special way for all the love and care and nurturing she has shown Alice over this last year.

These photo's are of some very white little crochet cotton doilies I bought from a charity shop some months ago and stashed away waiting for the perfect project. Now, don't get me wrong i like white but sometimes it can be a little too stark for my liking, so I decided to dye these with good old fashioned tea bags. All I did was pop 2 normal teabags in a bowl of boiling hot water and a half teaspoon of salt to ensure the colour fixed.

Here's how they turned out...

I quite like that more "antique" look about them rather than the stark, crisp white on this occasion. What do you think? Have you ever tried this before?

The idea for the style my blanket came from here, although this is just a little baby buggy blanket and not quite as big.

As you may remember I posted about the beginnings of making this blanket here. 

I quite like the "hole-y" effect that was made by me hooking the squares together. I made the squares with Rico baby classic yarn in UK trebles, chaining 30 + 3ch(as 1 treble) and crocheting 16 rows in each square. I don't normally go for pastel colours but I allowed Alice to choose these as I wanted her to be part of the making, so, here it is in it's entirety with me playing around for positioning of the little doilies.

Can you see more of the hole-y effect I was taking about? All in all I really enjoyed making this sweet, soft baby blanket of 12 squares and first a half-treble row and then 3 treble crochet rowed border followed by a slightly shelled/picot edge.

I just made this up as I went along and seemed quite satisfied with the end result.

I also had to stain some white cotton thread in the tea before sewing the doilies (I used 6 in the end) onto the blanket so as to make it match the doily colour.

I think I like it, despite never having made a blanket with such pastel colours. I do hope Mrs.W will get pleasure out of using it to keep her second baby cosy.

All wrapped up in this pretty Ravilious ABC wrapping paper and vintage lace bow. Alice wrote her the sweetest card which she preferred for me not to photograph for my blog (she's at that age!).

Thanks for stopping by and I hope you have enjoyed this bit of crochet for a change. I am linking up to Ta-Dah! Tuesday on Lakota's blog where you can see her makes as well as links to other great blogs and their makes.

Now...... for my next project!

Take care and see you soon

Penelope

xox