My favorite crafting modality is knitting, but I’ve been branching out during the past few years into crochet and cross-stitch, both of which I first learned as a child, before I got into knitting. A couple months ago, I was looking at my yarn stash and noticed some large skeins of acrylic yarn that I’ve had for a while. It dawned on me that they could make cute blankets for my daughter’s baby dolls and stuffed animals, so I got to looking for patterns.

I ended up using the V-Stitch Blanket Pattern from Daisy Cottage Designs. The example in the pattern post is exactly what I had envisioned, with alternating stripes of different colors and a finished edge. I modified the pattern slightly, starting with a ch 48 for a slightly smaller blanket. I wanted pink to be the primary color, with white and grey contrasting colors, so I alternated pink-white-pink-grey for a total of 31 stripes. For the border, I did 3 rounds of sc, one in each color. The final size is 14.5″x18″. Ravelry link

The baby dolls have their own bunk bed with a trundle bed underneath for a friend to visit, so I made 3 identical blankets. I think they turned out pretty cute! Total cost was $0, since I was using yarn from my stash, and all 3 blankets were pretty fast to make, just a couple weeks from start to finish, in bursts of time here and there.

Crochet is a great modality for projects like this. V-stitch in particular is nice because it takes up a fair bit of space and works up fast. It is an easy stitch to learn and doesn’t require a lot of focus once you have it memorized. The only part of this project I didn’t enjoy was weaving in all the ends, but that is a consequence of choosing to do stripes!