About a year and a half ago, I made Perpetua a blankie, which I detailed here. She’s grown since then (kids: it’s amazing what happens if you feed them) and so it was covering less and less of her. Time for an expansion! Here’s the before shot:

And here’s the after:

What I ended doing was simply flipping it around so that the long edge became the short edge, ordering three more skeins of the yard I’d used, and continuing the pattern from where I had left off. It’s a simple repeat of three rows of single crochet, followed by four rows of triple. I ended up using the whole of two skeins, and somewhere between a half and two-thirds of the third, so the size of the blanket has more than doubled.

For the border — yes, a proper border, look at me getting all fancy here — I first did three rows of single crochet followed by a row of triple, echoing the pattern of the blanket body. After that, I did two rows of chained loops (chain five, skip one, single crochet, repeat) to make a nice floppy fringe. And there you have it.

Several times I found myself wishing that I had used a nicer yarn when I originally started this project. Red Heart With Love is a sturdy workhorse sort of acrylic that will wear really well, but it’s stiff and a bit coarse straight out of the skein, and it splits like crazy. It just isn’t fun to work with. The end result will be ok, though; the older part of the blankie, which has of course been through the wash several times, is very soft and drapey. Tomorrow I will put the whole thing through once or twice and that will make a big difference. In the meantime you can see exactly where the old yarn stops and the new yarn starts:

After a big push to finish this tonight, I’m feeling a bit crampy in my hands. It’s totally worth it, though. On the one level, I’m always happy any time I finish a project and get it out of my queue — taking something from the idea stage all the way through to its completion is always a bit of a rush. But more than that, it’s very special to me to be able to give something to my daughter that I’ve made especially for her, that she will (hopefully) be able to use for many years to come. Not even the Red Heart can take away from that!