Baby’s got a brand new bag

I was all ready to tackle my first knitted baby blanket, preparing for the months of work ahead, when I discovered a clever little idea on Ravelry – the baby blanket bag, sometimes also called a kicking bag or sleep sack. It’s like a blanket, but knitted in the round with some ribbing at the top so you can pop the baby inside and they can kick and kick and the blanket doesn’t get thrown off. I’d never heard of them before, but over 400 members who’d made this project on Ravelry can’t be wrong, so I set to work to make one for my friend Mandy who was expecting in the spring.

I used two free patterns from Ravelry as inspiration – Annika’s Kicking Bag for Babies and Robyn Devine’s Snug as a Bug Sleep Sack, but adapted it because I wanted to use baby cotton DK yarn instead of the sock yarn Annika used and the Aran weight Robyn used. Then I used this pattern conversion site to work out the right number of stitches to cast on.

I chose the colours to match Mandy and Danny’s safari theme for their nursery and keep the blanket bag non-gender specific as they didn’t know if they were going to have a girl or a boy. It was a real pleasure to knit, the only thing that was a bit tricky was the ‘step’ issue you get with changing colours when working in the round, so I might knit it flat and sew up the seams if I make another one.

Here’s the gorgeous Ruben giving the bag a good testing! He’d already grown lots more than this by the time I got to meet him in June and reports from his parents are that he’s only managed to kick the bag off once, so a thumbs up from them.

S’no hat for snow

When I started making the Snowdrop Beret by Swallows Return for my brother’s girlfriend, Kitty, for Christmas, I didn’t really take notice of the fact it said it was a hat for spring (because of the lace pattern letting the breeze through!). When do we ever get really cold winters in the UK? I just thought it was a really pretty pattern.

Unfortunately, it’s been the coldest winter for 30 years and much of the country’s been covered in snow for quite a few weeks. Kitty discovered just how cold the wind was as it whipped through her hat on the beach in Norfolk on New Year’s Day. Sorry Kitty!

Still the pattern is pretty and, even though it took me a while, it did help me get to grips with lace. The only modification I made was using a weightier wool – Sirar Click Chunky in Indy. I chose this because I wanted the beret to be a bit floppier, but it made the pattern slightly less visible, so I think I would stick to dk weight if I made it again.

The pics below show the difference between the bumpy, lumpy hat pre-blocking.

And the smoother, flatter hat being blocked on a dinner plate.

To block, I just dampened the beret slightly (rather than washing it or soaking it) and followed Susie F Handmade’s blocking technique to protect the ribbing from stretching.

Hat’s the way I like it

It’s often the way with knitting that if anyone sees what you’re up to, they pipe up and ask you to make something for them too. This was the case when Woody, my housemate at the time, saw me feverishly trying to get Ruthie’s mittens ready before her birthday. I was foolish enough to agree. Woody liked the pattern of the mittens, but they’re not really the thing for the fashionable man about town, so I made him the hat instead. Although the pattern is for knitting the hat flat, I did it in the round and was much happier when I reached the end and there were no silly seams to sew up. No pic of Woody modelling the finished hat (yet), just me. I really enjoyed making this and I reckon I might get round to doing one for myself one day.

The only modifications I made to the pattern were starting with 12 rows of rib instead of 8 and I swapped the colours around a bit, so that I got more of colour A than colour C (I wanted it to be mostly grey).

The link to the pattern is in the my first mittens post.