An Angel Baby Blanket

(Topic: Stillbirth, knitting, donation)

Hi Friends!

Well, anxiety makes it hard to sleep and lack of sleep sometimes gives me migraines - not a great combo for sitting down and writing.

That said, I actually have a completed project to show you this week!

In the past I have donate blankets to the NICU, but then I found out there's a way to donate blankets to a cause closer to my heart (not that the NICU isn't a great place to donate to! Simply because of my own experience, the following cause is one I'm closer to).
I found out that my local infant loss support group, which is run out of a hospital, also supports families who are in the hospital and experience a loss.
One of the things they sometimes do is provide blankets to wrap the babies in. For this particular group, the parameters are 15"x15" (in non-gendered colors, for the tiny babies), and 18"x18" for the larger babies.

So when one of my sisters was asking for a knitting project idea, something portable and relatively quick, this seemed like the perfect thing to suggest! I provided yarn (white, acrylic) and needles and basic directions, and let her have at it.

And she turned out a wonderful blanket! I think my mom helped guide her (this sister is a beginning knitter), but the bulk of the work was my sister's.

Apparently the amount of yarn I gave her (which was from my stash!) was not quite enough to make up the full measurements. So I got asked to add a border. Luckily I had a similar yarn, in variegated neutral baby colors, to add an edging!

I started with her live edge, picked up down the side, across the bottom, and up the other side. I then added a few rows to the top, added a picot bind off, bound off one side, added a few rows and a picot bind off to the bottom, then bound off the other side.

All this worked fine, but I was having some rolling issues, so I decided to do some stitching to even things out.

Stitching the edging to the row that I picked up from. You can see the difference it makes in reducing the curl.

Here I'm stitching one of my added rows to one of the blanket rows, in effect doing an after-the-fact welt. Again, it makes a huge difference in having the edging lie flat.

From the back, you can see how I'm taking the row that was displaced by me picking up stitches, and stitching it to the edging two rows up.

The beautiful finished project! The slight widening on the ends is due to the picot edging placing a lot of stitches in a narrow space.

Credit goes mostly to my sister who created this lovely blanket, which I certain will be loved by the family it goes to! They will cherish it if they decide to keep it, and the baby will be forever snuggled if they decide to have it stay with baby.


Yours,

Sarah

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