babies get blankets

This baby blanket is going to be really hard. I’m trying to make it look like an undersea wonderland! I got this yarn, it’s blue and green. Not, like, baby blue and baby green, but royal blue and bright lime green. The first row is a purl row, it’s a green row. I’m going to do another green row next, and then some blue rows. It’s going to be skinny green stripes and fat blue stripes. But the tricky part is, I’d like it to be kind of wavy, like scalloped all the way through. But if I did that, then the fish would to be really hard to knit. These imaginary fish are a dusty, mustard yellow color. I’m going to have to sacrifice either the fish or the waves, I think.

The blanket is for my friend. He isn’t born yet. I’m pretty sure he’s a he. His mom got those crazy high resolution ultrasounds, and you can tell the baby has his dad’s nose. You can tell it from INSIDE her stomach. That’s nutty. In one of the pictures, he has his foot in his mouth. That baby is in there, eatin’ feet. So I am making him a wool blanket, even though he’s going to be born in July. It will keep til winter.

Babies are nuts. I want one pretty bad, but they’re also kind of horrifying. When this one gets born, I’m going to watch his parents very closely and see how it affects their lives. They’re my kind of people, so maybe I can do it too. I’m knitting for their baby because he’s new, and because I love them, but also because babies should have stuff made by hand, just for them, while they’re incubating. This baby doesn’t even need blankets, his great grandmother made him some before he was even dreamed of, before his mom met his dad, before she died. And isn’t that wonderful? So he has blankets, but it doesn’t matter. He doesn’t have a fishy blanket. Yet!

I cast on 160 stitches. This will make the blanket about 50 inches wide. I don’t even know if that’s the right size for a baby blanket. I know literally nothing about babies. A couple weeks ago these people asked my friend to baby-sit their baby in a pinch. She brought the baby to my shop, and we sat there looking at it and talking to it like it was an adult, and just handing it things to keep it amused. We gave him some crochet swatches, and a lip gloss, and a ball of yarn. We tried to let him crawl around on the floor but he kept trying to go outside. We were comically inept with the baby. We just kept looking at him like, man. What do we do with this? Maybe we should hand him something. Here, baby.

Once, when she tried to change his diaper, he was really squirmy, and he hit his head on the floor and cried, and then it was like, OH NO we probably killed the baby. He recovered pretty quickly, though. Babies are tough.

The little dude that’s on his way will be tough. His mom and dad are seriously tough. His mom has this badass tattoo of a unicorn and a rainbow. It’s giant, and the unicorn looks like it would kick your ass in a second. A few weeks ago his dad got punched in the face by a fat girl at 3 AM in the Cluck U chicken. He texted me and said “I think I’m in love.” These are his parents. This baby is going to be a rad baby. I’ve got 4 weeks to make him a rad blanket. With fishes on it. I'll post the results! If it ends up nice, I'll write up a pattern for you guys.