A Patchwork Blanket

I have four daughters of child bearing age. Quite rightly, because of where each of them is in their lives, not one of them is bearing any children. I am not completely desperate for grandchildren with my own two little ones to keep me busy, but it would be nice. I often imagined knitting a little something for the new baby as I awaited the moment that my child became a mother.

Recently, I sorted through my collection of wool, needles and pattern books that I have barely looked at for years.

I'd spent some really happy hours learning to knit with my mum as my mentor, trying all sorts of different projects from zombies, to meerkats to all the birds from the twelve days of Christmas. I also practised new techniques and designs on small squares that I intended to put together to make a patchwork blanket. My mum gave me three patchwork blankets that she made in the time it took me to make a handful of squares. My blanket project lost impetus.

Sorting through the knitting cupboard as part of my preparation for moving house this summer, memories of the happy times flooded back. I found the little plastic bag that I had kept all my blanket squares in and wondered what to do with them. I wasn't sure if it was something worth donating to a charity shop and I didn't want to just throw them away because each one was like a page in a special knitting diary. I was overcome with good feelings as I laid them out and quite surprised to find that by chance, I had made exactly enough for a 7x5 rectangle. I ignored my head that was telling me that I had too much to do to mess around with knitted squares and listened to my heart that was urging me to finish the job I'd started all that time ago and sew them together into an blanket (a small blanket but still a blanket).

I found a video on the internet that explained a few different ways of putting the squares together and decided on the one that I thought would work best for me and my limited sewing skills. My husband came home to no dinner that evening but I joined all the pieces... and I loved it. It was surprisingly relaxing. As for the finished item, I am really proud of it. It's a bit higgledy piggledy but the squares seem to blend together to create something different... to become what it was always meant to be. Definitely a case of the whole being more than the sum of the parts.

The cupboard is now sorted. I have donated a lot of what I had but kept a small number of needles and my very favourite pattern books just in case I feel the urge to get creative with wool. And I have a blanket. It is a tiny blanket but a tiny blanket that would be perfect for a new baby. Even if I never knit again, my first born grandchild will have a little something from its granny with love in every stitch.