Weekend blanket

There you have my weekend project. On Friday evening I bought the yarn on Final Fridays, which takes place the last Friday of the month in Nelsonville, where the shops and the galleries (majority art and craft related) stay open until 10 PM and often have something to eat or drink or special happenings. This time it was the 'dog days of summer' theme and people brought their dogs and they had competitions and such (King and Queen, dress-up, etc.).

The weekend project is a baby blanket for a office mate of mine. She is due in a month and I wanted to make something for her. The yarn is Plymouth Yarn Encore, worsted weight. I've never before used this yarn, although it is the most popular at the local yarn shop (Spinning Turtle in Nelsonville). I can't say I enjoyed working with it a lot, although I loved the colors. The yarn is 70% acrylic and 30% wool and is washable. I didn't want to make the mother-to-be's life too complicated by giving her a wool blanket, so I went with the washable yarn.

The pattern is 'Easy ripple afghan' and is a plain ripple pattern. I love the pattern. It was hard to stop and you just wanted to keep on going, especially with the frequent color changes. But other than that, it is a very easy to learn pattern and consists of only double crochet stitches (dc, stuðull), which makes it very quick.

I used 6mm (J) hook and started with 66 chain stitches. I started out with much more but ended in 66. It ended up as 23"x28" (60x70 cm) or 5 repeats of 4 colors (plus an extra stripe of blue) and used quite a bit less than a skein each of the 4 colors (each skein is 100 gr and 200 yards).

I still have to weave in the ends, and as you can see, there are plenty of them.

Here is another photo with our new dog, Ruby, included. This one has not been altered to fix the colors (unlike the first one).