Doggy Blanket: Knit & Crochet

Last time, I showed you a picture of the moss stitch neck-warmer that my son hijacked to become a Doggy Blanket. I made vague threats to crochet a border around it but have had little time and energy to devote to handicrafts owing to bogging family illness over the Easter break.

I was not thwarted for long! We were going to Hobby Craft for storage boxes and I thought I must be able to pick up a basic hook because I don't have any. I was fairly impressed that there's something of a decent knitting/crochet section there since the last time I visited: Pony needles, Rowan and Sirdar yarns, lots of patterns and magazines. They didn't have any 5mm hooks, so I grabbed a 4.5mm. I figured this would make the stitches a little tighter but this didn't really matter for this little project.

Here's what I started with, which was me just doing moss stitch in Sirdar Supersoft Aran until it was big enough to cover the beloved Doggy:

I borrowed some Poppy and Tangerine Sirdar Supersoft Aran from my Blanket of Death project and followed a You Tube video by Liat Gat on how to crochet a border around a knitted square. The first row came up a bit squiffy because the yarn in the blanket had become very fuzzy in places (note to self: crochet borders before giving blankets to toddlers who will inevitably chew, rub and generally abuse them). It was hard to see precisely where I should insert the crochet hook in a lot of places.

This is how it looked after the first row:

I found that the wonderful thing about crochet is its flexibility: it's easy to see what you're doing, where you've gone wrong, how to correct and to kind of patch it up a bit. By the time I'd crocheted three borders, the mistakes of the first where much less pronounced. I will freely confess that there is little method here but this didn't seem to matter. I confess, I really rather enjoy the madcap freedom of crochet compared to the seeming rigidity of knitting. There, I said it.

Whether this glorious sense of freedom is a genuine feature peculiar to crochet or I'll trip up further down the line because I wasn't conscientious enough to learn properly remains to be seen. For now though, here is a happy boy with his faithful canine companion, who has a natty new blanket for sofa snuggles:

(Yes, he has several of them. We thought we were canny buying a few - one in the wash, one at my parents', one for emergencies - but we didn't count on the uber-canniness of a toddler who notices absolutely everything all the time. In short, we were rumbled and he now sleeps up against the wall in bed)