Basket Weave Baby Blanket

Happy Valentine's Day, y'all!  This post isn't really about anything holiday related, but it IS about one of my favorite ways of showing /sharing my love - handmade baby blankets!  So, I still figure it's a good day to share this blog post ;)

About a year & a half ago, I shared my first-ever attempt at cables, with this blanket for a dear friend of mine.  Well, last month, she & her husband made a very special New Year's Eve announcement, and I started planning a blanket for her precious little baby due this spring =D

Just like last time, she is waiting to be surprised at the birth, and not finding out the sex of the baby ahead of time.  Which, (A) makes me super jealous, because I always wanted to do that, and (B) means I wanted to keep my yarn selection in the "gender neutral" colors (don't even get me started on how silly that nonsense is, really, but... whatever).  My sweet husband took me to JoAnn's on our way home from a date night dinner, and helped me pick this fluffy, snuggly, buttery yellow yarn that was just screaming out to me from the shelf:

Bernat Baby Blanket yarn, "buttercup" color

Baby blankets are always kinda tricky for me, when it comes to picking the stitch to use.  On the one hand, they're small enough that they're a great opportunity to try a new technique.  But, on the other hand, I don't want to use any stitch intricate enough that little fingers will get tangled!  Because this yarn is so chunky & fluffy to begin with, I kept it relatively simple and went with a Basket Weave - one of my most favorite stitches!

Basket Weave is one of those things that looks super impressive, but is actually incredibly easy to do... it's simply repeating a pattern of strategically placed front-post-double-crochet and back-post-double-crochet stitches, so that you create squares of vertical stripes or horizontal stripes:

With yarn of a lower weight, you would do 4 of each stitch (i.e. 4 fpdc, 4 bpdc, 4 fpdc, 4 bpdc...), repeating for 4 rows, then doing 4 rows of the opposite pattern (4 bpdc, 4 fpdc...), to make the checkerboard.  Because this yarn is so fat, I only had to do 2 rows to make squares, but the effect is still there.

I ended up with a perfect-sized baby blanket, soft enough for snuggly tummy time, but secure enough to be safe & to survive frequent trips to the washing machine ;)  I can't wait to hear if Baby C likes it!