I hope you all had wonderful holidays! I definitely have been busy the past few weeks! Visiting with family, taking my nieces to get pictures taken with Santa, shopping with my sisters for Christmas presents, baking cookies with my mom (these are my favorite holiday cookies!), celebrating Hanukkah and remembering our Savior’s Jewish roots, celebrating Christmas and remembering the night of our dear Savior’s birth, giving gifts, relaxing and wedding planning as well!

A while ago, I stumbled across on the internet and decided that I wanted to start crocheting a blanket like this one over my Christmas break:

My friend, Tonya, and I used to knit and crochet all the time in middle school. We made tons of scarves and baby blankets, but I hadn’t ever made a large blanket like this. Luckily, my mom is super crafty and knows how to do all kinds of sewing things, so she refreshed my memory on my crochet stitches and read the pattern for me and showed me how to do it. It is really easy once you get the hang of it!

I ended up going to Walmart the day before Christmas Eve and bought 18 colors of yarn to work with. I seriously left the store with three huge bags full of yarn. ($50 worth!) I ended up wrapping them up for a Christmas present to me from my parents (they usually have us pick out things we want, wrap them and open them on Christmas) and then on Christmas Eve when we opened gifts, I looked like this:

My mom and I both started working on it that night and have been crocheting constantly for the past few days and have a pretty much finished blanket already!

We made lots and lots of circles before we started connecting them together.

We also tried to make sure that no two circles were alike so we spent a lot of time comparing the ones we were working on with the ones already done. We tried to make sure that we made the same number of centers out of each color and the same with the middle rows and outsides so that all colors would be well represented in the end.

It was harder than you would think to try to determine what circles to put next to each other to balance out the blanket!

We aren’t completely done, I still want to add a few more rows to make it a little bigger, and I have to go back in and thread in the tails of yarn, but so far we have this: (it is roughly 3×5 feet)

I think this blanket would also be really pretty made a little smaller for a baby blanket. It would also be pretty in a different color scheme as well.

I love the way the colors look together and I love the shapes. They look like little flowers. I also love the little star design that is made in the connecting corners between the colors (in the white part).

These are the colors of yarn that I used. The large white one on top is the connecting color. As you can see, the blanket is in the background, so this is how much yarn I had leftover after making a blanket this big. I still plan on making it bigger, so in the end I’ll use more of each kind than shown here, but you could easily make more than one blanket out of the yarn  bought for this project. I bought two of the super jumbo white one on top and we used all of one and a little bit of the one pictured here.

To make it, I used directions, with a size H crochet needle. That blog also shows pictures that might be helpful if you haven’t crocheted much before. To sum up her words, this is pretty much how you do it:

ch = chain, st = stitch, ss = slip stitch, dc = double crochet.

Start: make 5 ch, join with ss into a ring.

1st round: 4ch (=1dc,1ch), 1dc + 1ch 11 times. Join with ss in 3rd ch. 12 dc.

2nd round: Start in one of the ch spaces. 3 ch (= 1dc), 1dc, 1ch, *2dc, 1ch* in the remaining ch spaces. Join with ss in 3rd ch. 12 groups of 2 dc.

3rd round: Start in one of the ch spaces. 3 ch (= 1dc), 2dc in ch space, 1ch, *3dc, 1ch* in the remaining ch spaces. Join with ss in 3rd ch. 12 groups of 3 dc.

4th round: Start in one of the ch spaces. 4ch (= 1 tr), 1tr, 3ch, 2tr, (=1st corner), *1ch, (2dc,1ch,2dc) in next ch space, 1ch, (2dc,1ch,2dc) in next ch space, 1ch, (2tr, 3ch, 2tr) (=2nd corner)**, repeat * to ** 2 times, 1ch, (2dc, 1ch, 2dc) inthe next two ch spaces, 1ch. Join with ss to 4th ch.

I used the assembly line method so I made a lot of circles before I started the 4th round and then joined them like this:

Start in a corner. Crochet 2tr, 1ch,next ch through the corner of the other square, 1ch, 2tr. (The first corner is done). Side: 1ch,(2dc, 1ch through 1ch on other square, 2dc), 1ch (2dc, 1ch through 1ch on other square, 2dc), 1ch. Next corner (where you will join square to the square to the right and the one above): 2tr, 1ch, 1ch through corner of square to the right, 1 ch through corner of the square above, 2 tr. Do the next side as the first. In the next corner you crochet 1 ch through the corner of the square above. Finish the round as in pattern.

Final Border:  One row of dc first. On dc in every dc and one dc in every ch space. 5 dc in the corners. One row of sc in every dc of last round. make one extra sc in the corners. One row of loops: Start with one sc, chain 4, skip two sc on last round – all the way round.

, is some more info on the lady’s blanket who wrote the directions above and more info on what the final border looks like. She calls her blanket, “Flowers in the Snow.”

Happy Crocheting! :)

P.S. My mom and I were both crocheting pretty fast the whole time, have previous experience crocheting, and we seriously worked on it all day long and late into the night almost every day over the past few days, so unless you have unlimited amounts of time to give to it all at once, I wouldn’t expect to finish yours so quickly! I thought it would take me months to do when I first decided to do it. I can’t believe we got so much done already! :)

*****UPDATE*****

See the blanket completely done in this post, here.