Baby Blankets - I Know Just Enough To Get Myself Into Trouble

This post is brought to you by my iPhone from my couch.

I asked my grandmother for her fish chowder recipe a while back and I got the quintessential "Grandma recipe" that read something like "I put this and this in with a handful of this and sometimes I put this in it if I have it in the cabinet. Boil it until it's just right. Then I taste it and I might add this. Then I say the magical words and stir the pot twice and it comes out amazing."...yeah...mine tasted nothing like hers. I did bug her for more details through about 6 more e-mails, but I'm still convinced that the secret ingredient is you have to be a grandma. 

Anyway, my grandma asked me about the baby blankets I made and funny enough I have only slightly more detail than a "grandma recipe" to offer. I know how to knit and crochet (theoretically, anyway), but I know just enough to get myself into trouble. When I made Matthan's blanket, which is when I taught myself how to crochet, I think I threw it across the room several times due to it (unintentionally) taking the shape of a triangle. There may have been curse words uttered. 

Both times, I made a boy blanket and a girl blanket since we didn't know which we were having, but this time I actually used a pattern. Well, sort of. 

For the boy blanket, I used this pattern, except I altered the row colors to add an extra row in order to make it a bit bigger...because I can't be bothered with things like gauging. 

For the girl blanket (modeled by our sweet Lucy) I used this pattern, more or less. I crocheted strips until I was happy with their length, then determined 5 strips was adequate, and crocheted them together. I made up some way to connect them (single crochets?), but it created ridges on the underside (pictured below) which I'm not thrilled with. I would have put more thought into how I connected them, but I was under a time crunch (read very pregnant and grumpy). And then Lucy showed up a day shy of 42 weeks so the joke was on me. The border is one row of single crochets, one row of double crochets, and a row of picot stitches (which I picked out of a book at the last minute). 

So there you have it, my only slightly better than a grandma recipe details about the baby blankets I made. I think I'm better at making cute babies ;)