Alaskan Baby Blanket

One of Dandelionslayer's colleagues recently became a father, so I had to whip something up for the new baby.  While the men have a running joke about Gollum from The Hobbit, I just didn't think that would be a comforting image for a blanket.  Instead, in keeping with the new father's outdoorsy personality and Alaskan background, we picked out some squares from The Crochet Crowd's Alaskan Inspired C2C Character collection.  There are 19 large squares in the free downloadable pattern book, and it was hard to narrow down the choices.  So Dandelionslayer selected six, and I crocheted them using 3 hdc per square, instead of dc, to keep them smaller.  It's still a big blanket, but he's already a big baby.

We did make some adjustments to a couple of the patterns.  Dandelionslayer redrew the caribou to have a more natural looking nose.

And I thought the moose ought to fill more of the square and have a more impressive rack.  (It has eyes, too.  You can see them up close.)

You can download a copy of our hand-drawn graphs here:
Moose and Caribou Graphs PDF

Still trying to keep it small, I only used the first round of the border described with each square, then joined the squares with one row of sc.  I then outlined the whole with one more round of sc.

This was a fun project for the summer, since the squares didn't get too big on my lap.  While most took longer, I did complete half of the moose square in one morning, waiting for Scoot to pack.  As soon as he finished, we dropped him off at the Missionary Training Center in Provo, Utah, where he's preparing to be a missionary for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.  He'll be serving in Belgium and the Netherlands for the next two years.  It's exciting, but I'm glad I had the moose to keep me calm that morning.

Dandelionslayer is pretty pleased with the baby blanket, and keeps using it as a cushion.  I hope it will still be in good shape when his friend returns from paternity leave!