“Little Boxes of Joy” (A Baby Blanket)
I always make new blankets for close friends and family when they’re expecting a baby, and when my sister-in-law found a design she liked on Pinterest in June, I was excited to start. I had two weeks to find the pattern and finish the blanket before her baby shower. The pattern, "Little Boxes of Joy," was only available through the book Cosy Crochet Blankets to Snuggle Under* by Ana Morais Soares (Amazon), which I surprisingly found at my local library (!!).
Thoughts on the Pattern
I’d classify this pattern as intermediate or advanced, and I highly recommend it for experienced crocheters. It introduced a few new (to me) techniques that I really enjoyed:
Interlocking Stitches (aka Double Filet Crochet) – You start with one color and make one row, but then before continuing to the second row you go back to the beginning of your first row and pick up your second color to make another “row 1” but weaving your second colored-stitches around the first. It sounds complicated but looks cool and makes me wonder how the author thought of this!
Reversible Design – Okay so the whole point of interlocking stitches is that they have reversible designs but I’m separating “reversible” as it’s own line item because this design is a complex spin on crochet structuring and it tickled my brain in a really fun way.
Crisp Corner Shaping – This pattern created sharp points with a simple sc, ch2, sc sequence in the corners of the border. I’ve never tried this before and was extremely pleased. I know, I should’ve tried that a long time ago! I’ve always just used 3 sc in corners.
This was a challenging, yet manageable project. Getting started was really rough - there was a lot of cussing. The directions were tricky, and I restarted several times, which didn’t look good for my tight deadline.
Another thing that tripped me up was that you also have to be careful to pull your working yarn across the rows when you finish them so that they are set up to continue later, and if you forget you don’t realize until you’ve finished an additional row. Every time I did this I would cut and rejoin my work to avoid frogging a whole row, so unfortunately there were several loose ends to weave in.
My last complaint was the border and this is really just a preference on my part and not really a problem with the pattern. I thought using both colors in the border would take away from the cool looking gradient I had so I used white only, and did 5 rounds instead of 7 to make it thinner. I also didn’t add the multi color cord in the border that the pattern recommended.
The Yarn
The pattern calls for Scheepjes Softfun, but I used Premier Yarns Anti-pilling Everyday Worsted in Snow White (1080 yds) and Anti-pilling Everyday Worsted Gradient in Orange Tones (720 yds). Unfortunately, the pattern doesn't specify yardage, only the number of Scheepjes balls, so I underestimated how much yarn I'd need.
This project pushed my crochet skills in new directions, and took longer than expected (a month instead of the two weeks I estimated) but seeing the finished blanket makes all the effort worthwhile and I’m already thinking about what pattern from this book I’ll tackle next. And, of course, I’m excited for my sister-in-law to wrap the little one in it and I hope it brings warmth and comfort to the newest member of our family.
