Knitting Circle Baby Blanket

The puddock-baby - three weeks old and still looking all squishy-faced - belongs to a dear friend of mine who is also a regular knitting companion. There are several of us who go and knit together on Wednesday lunchtimes in a quiet spot near to all our offices. We feel deliciously subversive to be away from our screens and papers and engaged in productive, often creative labour. We chat about this and that, and help each other - and newbies are welcome - with any little technical issues and the interpretation of patterns.

C is the first of our regulars to produce young. Of course babies are great fun to knit for - everything is so small, so cute, so simple. But rather than make lots of unnecessary objects, someone thought of making a joint effort.

So, one of us had the idea; four of us (including me) knitted a few squares each; I did the logistics and volunteered to crochet them together. The rules were that squares should be made of machine-washable wool, roughly 12cm square, and in any design and colour the maker felt inspired. Once I'd got enough squares, I laid them out in a pleasing arrangement of colours, discarded a couple of extra ones, and worked a crochet border around each of them in black. I laid them out again, tweaked the arrangement, then crocheted them together along the zigzags. At top right is what it looked like at that point.

Finally, after the little matter of working in an unreasonable number of ends for something so small, I washed it on wool cycle and pinned it out to a neatish rectangular shape. Together with compensation in the crochet and in the arrangement, that took care of the differences in size and squareness.

Here is C's picture of the blanket in action. The puddock is in there, too. He's also got a magnificent alphabet quilt from a lady in America.