Circle of Co-Workers Baby Blankets

I work at an architectural firm and there were two babies due to two different co-workers this summer. This spring, someone took some knitting lessons at Purl and that brought some more experienced knitters out of the woodwork, which led to more would-be newbies. I thought it would be a great project to make collaborative baby blankets for both of the co-workers. When I floated the idea, everyone was crazy for the design in Last Minute Knitted Gifts.

Nothing comes without complications, even things that are "Last Minute" and even things that are all garter stitch. We wanted a somewhat washable cotton (I usually translate cotton labels that say "hand-wash" to "machine-wash gentle"), and we had to get enough of the right colors. Each blanket needs seven colors, and we needed two totally different color schemes. One couple is using "white" as their decorating/clothing color of choice for the baby, and one couple was waiting to find out the gender of the baby most specifically to avoid the deluge of pink or blue gender-themed stuff, but they're generally very colorful folks. And did I mention I work with architects? These are design minded sophisticates, not happy to just throw together any old thing, these colors had to be right.

Then people figured we had to do individual squares, not the strips the book calls for (too complicated with color switching, we had more than seven knitters for the seven strips, everyone wanted to do some on each blanket), so that left us with 49 squares to sew up for each blanket. Yeah, that's 168 seams total. Don't ask me how many ends we sewed in. Many new knitters learned casting on, binding off, and the tediousness of seaming and sewing in.

But finally, finally, I threw a single crochet border on them. And finally, finally, they are done, and they are gorgeous.