Shell Stitch Blanket

As promised, I've branched out from my usual round ripple blanket and tried something new. I made this shell patterned baby blanket as an excuse to use up the large stash of Bernat Baby Coordinates that I've been building up. The pattern is based on the Rippling Shells pattern in the book 7-Day Afghans by Jean Leinhauser and Rita Weiss.


If you have any book of basic crochet motifs, you can probably mimic it pretty easily. The main stitch is a basic shell made up of five double crochet stitches. The only alteration I made to the pattern was that after the first row I crocheted in the back loop only. After some experimenting I found that this just made the shells pop out a bit more. Overall, I really enjoyed working on this one. The shell stitch is very simple to do and the work becomes mindless after a couple of rows so you don't have to be constantly double-checking the pattern.

I tried to keep the stripes at about four rows per colour, but since my goal was to finish off a bunch of leftover scraps there are some places where I couldn't complete a full set of four rows. Most noticeable is the row in the middle where there's a switch from purple to yellow that stands out quite a bit. Aside from that, I'm very happy with how this blanket turned out and pleased to see my wool inventory is a little bit smaller now.



I have no idea who I'm going to give this blanket to. I know there are plenty of charities out there that accept knitted and crocheted baby blankets so it may end up going off to one of them. If anyone has any suggestions as to places in Canada where I could donate the blanket feel free to drop me a note in the comments section.