Peach Chevron Baby Blanket – Free Pattern

It turns out that blankets are much larger than hats, which makes them take longer to finish and therefore kind of boring, or so I thought. The union of the two events 1) an invitation to a friend’s upcoming baby shower for her new baby girl and 2) receiving a trash bag full of lovely “baby” weight yarn from a kind aunt-in-law motivated me to give the baby blanket a chance. It turned out that it actually came together pretty quickly (double crochets, man!), and it was so darling and soft as it grew that now I can’t wait to make another one. Somebody have another baby!

                                        I know that patterns for these simple zig-zag blankets are all over the internet, but I have to start somewhere with drafting my own patterns, and perhaps you will be able to follow mine better than some of the others. One thing I dislike about many patterns I find out there on the web is that they give you a gauge, but what to do if my gauge isn’t even close to that of the pattern? To remedy this, throughout my patterns I will try to give measurements in addition to stitch counts as much as I can. This way, if your gauge doesn’t match mine, you can still follow my pattern by starting with my given stitch count but adding or subtracting based on measurements, and the finished product will still be the same size and proportion. Luckily for us, blankets don’t have to be a very specific size, so we both have some wiggle room.

The one thing I forgot to do this time was to weigh the finished blanket for you (before I gave it away) so that we would have an accurate knowledge of the amount of yarn required, but it was about four skeins of “baby” yarn, at least some of which was the Bernat brand.

I like to use charts to learn new patterns when I can. The charts below give you everything you need to reproduce the blanket. Click on each picture to enlarge it so that you can see the details. The first figure is of the whole blanket, which measures 30 by 46 inches. The third figure is the 30 inch width of the blanket, showing how the edges are worked and how many “zigs” and “zags” I used. The middle figure zooms in on the left hand side of the third figure, with each “hook” icon representing on double crochet and each “circle” representing one chain. The entire blanket is composed of only double crochets and chains.

To begin the blanket, you should chain 138, and then create the zig-zag motif according to figures 2 and 3. Note that in order to make a “peak,” two double crochets must be performed in the same space (the big space made by the two chains in the previous row) with two chains in between them, and to make a “valley,” two spaces must be skipped. Each section, whether it be a “zig” or  a “zag,” measures 3.75 inches, as indicated in the figures, and there are 9 sections total across the width of the blanket. I used three yarn colors, changing colors after every 10 rows and going on for 90 rows, which resulted in 9 equally wide stripes, 3 of each color. My colors were different shades of peach, and I started with the darkest and ended with the lightest so as to produce a gradient effect.

 

 

 

Figures 1, 2, and 3 with measurements and accurate numbers of stitches (click to enlarge)

So, can you follow my pattern, and do you have suggestions for future pattern posts?

Thanks for reading,

-Danielle

Questions? Comments? Please email me at [email protected] or comment on my facebook page at https://www.facebook.com/calicojoy.