A few weeks ago, a friend’s mother gave me a couple of well-stocked bags of yarn. I’ve had a pattern in mind for a while, but hadn’t the yarn for it, so it was relegated down the list of Project Priorities while I completed the Sunshine Shawl, and thence a baby blanket.
But a set of five and a bit balls of Hayfield Spirit chunky yarn in Sundown in the donated bags meant that other project leap-frogged the blanket.
Thus I set to work on a baby sleeping bag instead. I’ll get back to the blanket afterwards, when I shall find a pattern or stitch a tad more exciting than just another giant granny square. Now that I’ve tried other crochet patterns, I’m not in a hurry to return to granny squares.
I knew from the off that I’d probably need one, maybe two, more balls of the yarn to complete the sleeping bag, but I had enough to be going on with and I could work out how many extra I needed when I got to the end of them.
The pattern I was using (from 9 Months to Crochet, although my copy of the pattern came from a magazine) actually wants it to end up being an ombre-coloured sleeping bag, but one reason I’ve been putting it off is because the yarn it uses is no longer made and I’ve been only half-heartedly trying to find a suitable replacement with sufficient shades of one colour. Anyway, the donated yarn is a pastel rainbow, so that’s what the bag will be. Colourful, which I understand tiny babies like.
The sleeping bag is made in the waffle stitch, which is an easy two-row repeat stitch, and I started by adding up the number of rows of squares I needed (62), before getting going. It was a much faster pattern than I thought it might be, and in the end I only needed one extra ball (plus a tiny bit of something else to finish stitching the hood together). So six to seven 100g balls (about 1100m) in total.
And then ten toggles to make it easy to close around baby. It ended up being a tad larger than the original pattern says, which I presume is due to using a different yarn (or possibly because I used the 6.5mm hook the yarn suggested instead of the 6mm one of the pattern), but it fits cosily in the moses basket and should keep a winter-baby warm and snug on cold nights.
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Life Ever Crafting 