Baby blankets

I didn't get very far with my knitting this week, so I thought I'd show you a completed project from early last year. I made two embroidered blankets for my husband's aunt and uncle who were having twin boys.





The pattern is taken from this Australian book by Gloria McKinnon (it seems to now be out of print - I bought my copy from TradeMe).


I used dark blue merino fabric for the blankets and backed them with quilting cotton. The bear is made of velour fabric, with appliqued detail and the flowers are embroidered with wool. In the book the blankets are quite small (bassinette sized), but I made these ones big enough to fit a cot as I thought this size would be more useful.

While this book has nice design ideas, it is really aimed at people who already know embroidery stitches so I ended up constantly referring to a stitch dictionary each time I had to do a different stitch. This was the first time I'd done embroidery other than cross stitch and I struggled at first with wanting my stitches to be "perfect" and look exactly like the picture in the book. It took me a while to realise it didn't matter if my buttonhole stitches were uneven - they still looked fine and no-one else would notice.