My first baby blanket (the blanket, not the baby!)

This blanket is one I made for my friend Nikki's first baby. I bought some lovely yarn from the wonderful Twist Fibre Craft. The yarn was Debbie Bliss Cashmerino Aran in, and the pattern was adapted from the Sudoku blanket pattern from the Essential Home supplement in Simply Knitting (April '07 issue). I liked the colours in this range, and ended up with 7 different colours. Because it was supposed to be a baby blanket, and the Sudoku blanket pattern was intended for a double bed and was enormous, I decided to halve the size of the squares. As this was my first big knitting project, unfortunately I didn't immediately realise that the different stitch patterns that make up the nine different squares of the blanket require different numbers of stitches cast on. That, coupled with having to get the pattern repeats right, made it quite difficult to just halve the square size. But, by a bit of trial and error, I managed (sort of). By the time I blocked the squares, they were more or less the same size.

The sharp eyes may have realised that there is a difference in then placing of the squares between the first and the second pics above. This was because I spent ages creating an illusion of randomness, then 'the boys' (Barry, Andy, Abdallah etc.) managed to mix it all up. The girls at Borders knitting group will remember my agonies at trying to make it all 'random' again. With 9 different patterns and 7 colours, it was not easy to not have two colours or two similar patterns together!
There was a bit of a disaster early on when I managed to lose the pattern book when I took my knitting to Crieff Hydro hotel for a work symposium, but luckily, the lovely ladies at our Borders bookshop knitting group also bought the mag and copied the pattern for me.
The blanket was finished off with a row of double crochet and shells (after starting over about five times because it was too ruffly). Latest report is that baby Alex likes it!