Making a Rainbow Baby Blanket

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Such a nice end result to a large project!

My first knit project that I have done a blog post about! This project is a gift for my cousin who is having a baby girl soon. Unfortunately, I don’t have many people having babies right now so it is always exciting to make a baby blanket for someone. When looking for yarn I thought that this particular yarn would make a great baby blanket. I decided to knit the blanket instead of crocheting the whole thing to have a tighter structure and for it to be a lighter weight. For a baby blanket I like to have minimal holes and I do love the drape that the knit gives you. This is not to say that you can’t make a nice crochet baby blanket that has nice drape and minimal holes. When making a baby blanket you just want to make sure the blanket is safe for little hands and feet! My hope is that it will be a nice special handmade heirloom for many years.

Pattern/Construction

I overall followed this pattern from Yarnspirations called “Free Caron Little Ridges Knit Baby Blanket Pattern”. It is a simple pattern which is what I was looking for that way the colors of the yarn could shine. It was going to be this or just doing garter stitch for the whole blanket. Which essentially this pattern is but you purl every 8 rows to create some stockinette stitch. I really like this idea to help break up the monotony of just doing the knit stitch. I also love the look of the stockinette parts to help create some visual interest. It also helps to highlight the color changes. 

After I was done knitting to the length that I wanted for the blanket I binded off. Then before I cut the yarn I did two rows of single crochet. I wanted a border to help clean up the edges a bit. It was also nice to help give the blanket some weight and structure on the edges. For the first row of single crochet for about every 3 stitches I picked up I would skip one to try and minimize curling. It still wanted to curl so I will have to experiment with doing borders on blankets more. My hope is that as it is washed that it will even out. This was my first time adding a crochet border to something that I knit. So, I am happy for the experience and I learned a lot!

The right side of the project with the stockinette rows.

Wrong side of the blanket with garter and reverse stockinette.

The Yarn

The yarn I used was from Lion Brand’s Ice Cream line in the colorway Parfait. It is a weight 3 yarn and is 100% acrylic. For blankets, especially baby blankets, acrylic is nice so that it is durable and easily washable. Overall I really like this yarn. It is soft, but not the softest acrylic that I have worked with before.  A complaint that I do have is that that one ball had a lot of factory knots in it. Normally I wouldn’t be too bothered by this, but with a color changing yarn it can disrupt your color changes. I also think that it was reasonably priced for what you get and the amount of yarn. I was able to make the baby blanket with about 3.5 balls of yarn.

The color changes were nice and I really like the pastel rainbow that it creates. I do wish that there was a little more yardage between the color changes. However, I did decide to make a blanket so if you made a smaller project with the yarn you would get a lot more time between the color changes. I still have about half a ball of yarn left from the project so I will probably make something smaller so that I can see how the color changes work differently. Overall, I really like this yarn as I am a big fan of Lion Brand yarns in general.

Needles and Hooks

The Needles that I used were Knit Picks interchangeable needles size 4mm in Caspian. If you haven’t tried their needles before I recommend getting their TRY IT sample pack. This is what I bought and used for this project. I hope to get a full set of their interchangeable needles eventually. This is great so that you can see if you would prefer to buy a full set in their wood needles or their steel needles. I like both materials, but I like the lighter weight of the wood needles and prefer their feel in my hands. For the border I used my favorite Clover Amour Hook in size F 3.75mm. I like the slightly smaller size for the crochet part that way the stitches could remain tight.

Time…

In total it took me about 22 hours to knit and crochet this blanket. This blanket took so much longer than I originally thought that it would. I don’t know if I will ever knit a blanket with weight 3 yarn again. If I do it will be much smaller. The blanket was only about 40x40” wide and it still took that long. This project has solidified why I personally like to crochet blankets more than knit them. Doing the crochet border did give me the urge to try and crochet a baby blanket with this yarn, but that might be further down the line. Maybe if there are other babies in the family soon! The same yarn also has some other colors that would make a beautiful blanket.

So naive at the start to how long this was going to take…

In the end I adore the finished result for this blanket. I have learned a lot from this project. Like learning how long it takes to knit a blanket of this size with weight 3 yarn. Since it takes so long to knit a blanket like this I have learned that if I decide to sell baby or adult size blankets that I will want to use a lot thicker yarn. For special projects like this and gifts it is a beautiful result. I don’t have any regrets about the time that it took to knit the blanket even though I was frustrated at times. Thank you so much for taking the time to read this post. If you would like to see other content from me look me up on Tik Tok and Instagram!