Tuesday, December 30, 2008

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.

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hello from Iceland!
Found your site while I was browsing crochet sites and LOVE IT, love it, love it! Keep on blogging like maniac, I´ll be reading :)

Yarni Gras! said...

neonatal unit at your local hospital :-)

Cecily said...

Is there anyway you could post the pattern? I love this blanket but I can't figure out how to get it started! Thanks

amber said...

Hi Cecily, as I mentioned in the post this pattern comes from a book called 7 Day Afghans by Jean Leinhauser and Rita Weiss. It's not my original design and to post a copy of that pattern would be copyright infringement.

I have checked and the book is available through Amazon.com for only $11.66. Alternatively, most crochet stitch guides, such as Harmony Guides: Basic Crochet Stitches by Erika Knight (which I like to use) will also show you how to make a shell stitch pattern.

Then after you've made the base row in the shell pattern described in the books, to make it look like mine you stitch all future rows in the back loop only.

Hope that advice can help you get started! Have fun stitching!

kasha said...

Thank you for the post, the pictures and hint. I found my book. Your afghan turned out so much better than the one in the book. dc in back makes it puff out more. Thank you for hint! Also found the book( hard copy)at amazon for less than $3 plus postage. There are other nice afghans in that book that I just have to try!