Patchwork Baby Boy Blanket

So as I mentioned in my post back in February, I have made a patchwork baby blanket, and this weekend was the baby shower where I gifted it, so I can now share it with you:

I started with a centre panel where I wanted to knit in some wording, and then I used the pattern from my cable knit throw.  Around the outside of this panel I created a patchwork made up from squares.

I came up with the idea of making a patchwork because I wanted to use up the scrap yarn I already had, but because I hadn't calculated how much yarn I would use, I did need to buy some extra yarn to finish off the blanket. Rather than make a poor colour match with the yarn I already had, I chose too buy a new shade of blue altogether; 'Pale Ocean'.

               
     Baby Blue            Turquoise            Ocean Blue              Pale Ocean            Navy Blue             Pale Blue               Charcoal

I knitted the squares in garter stitch using 4mm needles, cast on 19 and did roughly 36 rows (all knit), this gave me the 4"x4"square. Initially I was going to make all of the squares using the plain garter, but on the outside border I decided I could mix it up a little bit; I used the stitch library in my Knitters Bible, to find some cool patterns, and also just experimented with some simple stripes and shapes with some other squares






I thought the blanket knit up really nicely, the squares all kept their size perfectly and I only had to block the cable squares and the knitted writing.

I started by attaching the squares randomly as I knit them, but the closer I got to the end, I had to start plotting where each square would go so that I didn't have two of the same colour touching. I found this easiest to do on the computer so I could keep changing them around.

I am really happy with the finished blanket, although I couldn't picture exactly how it would look like when I first started, I had a certain 'look' in mind, which I think I have acheived!