My niece is turning 6 on Monday, and thanks to the show "Beat Bugs," she is a huge Beatles fan. Enough of a fan, in fact, to have a Beatles themed birthday party! She decided this far enough in advance that I was confident I could finish a (small) project in time, and I started searching online for a project. Of course, I just couldn't find anything that really called to me. Lots of Sgt. Pepper amigurumi stuff, but... honey, no... I felt myself moving in the direction of a blanket to snuggle up with, but I couldn't find any great patterns. So, I drew inspiration from a picture I saw online, and I came up with a pattern I could turn into a graphgan (afghan made from a graphed pattern, where 1 block = 1 stitch).
Keeping with the Beatles theme, I picked a psychedelic-looking yarn for the words, and a super soft grey for the background. Even though it can look intimidating at first, a graphgan is actually super easy - you just carry the non-working yarn along inside the stitches, and switch back-and-forth whenever the chart tells you to. Depending on which stitch you use, you may need to do TWO stitches for each block on the graph (i.e., in sc, 1 stitch is accurate, but hdc, dc, or even tc will really skew your results - I did this blanket in all hdc, which is why mine is taller & narrower than the graph.), but other than that, it's quite straightforward. The only important thing to remember is to always hold the "secret" yarn towards the back of the picture, so that it doesn't show through on the front side. You can definitely see some spots where I got lazy with that (particularly the bottom left side), and I tried to pay more attention to that as I went on.
Once I had the graphed portion of the blanket done, I went around the whole thing with single crochet, then did a second round in dc. This made a nice, uniform border, and also helped restore the blanket to a more squared shape, after it got wonky from being handled so much.
I'm really hoping my niece likes this blanket. In true almost-6-years-old fashion, she changed her mind about a week ago & requested a gymnastics party (though my sister did me a solid & merged the two), but she still loves the Beatles & neon colors ;) Either way, this project was fun & a big step for me into trying new techniques!
