photos CAL Babydecke / baby blanket

Between October and December 2013 the pattern to this blanket was published in German on Jessica’s blog ≈ as a crochet along in 13 parts. My idea was to teach beginners how to improve their skills and to encourage them to accomplish a „bigger task“ such as a (baby) blanket.

They were introduced to several (more or less) complicated stitches, „embedded“ into crochet basics, such as sc, hdc, and dc rows. Each session consisted of 10 rows – including (at least) 1 special stitch.

Comments, feedback, and pictures were (and still are!) very welcome over at facebookCAL Babydecke Teil 2So sehen die ersten 20 Reihen der Babydecke aus. / This is how the first 20 rows of our babyblanket CAL look like.

Danke für die wunderbaren Bilder und Mails, die Ihr uns seither geschickt habt! / Thanks a million for all those wonderful pictures and mails that you’ve sent ever since!

Bilder der fertigen Decken sind in unserer Galerie / Pictures of all finished blankets can be found here.

Dank an Alle die mitgemacht haben! / Thanks a lot for joining!

A German CAL

Hooray! I finished both blankets last night! The acrylic blanket measures 42″ x 42″; the sock yarn blanket is almost twice as big: 44″ x 70″ and I am perfectly happy with both of them. Looks like the smaller one will be for a baby in Washington (as planned), whereas the sock yarn blanket gets to stay with us. At least for now :). I have been crocheting those blankets since June 1 and – believe it or not – I am still excited, hooked, and determined to start over and make another.

Hannah's blanket

This time it will be different though as I designed my own blanket together with Jessica (over at schoenstricken.de)! It is made of cotton yarn in rainbow colors and will have the size of a baby blanket (27″ x 35″) once it is done. And with Christmas approaching at an alarming rate (…) we decided to serialize the pattern as a German CAL.

The whole thing was triggered off in summer when I introduced the idea of a CAL to Jessica’s readers as a guest blogger. CALs are not very popular in Germany (yet!), but the feedback we received on that blog post was tremendous. Shortly after, we started to meet once the week. I would crochet while Jessica would take pictures and slowly but steadily a colorful „beginner blanket“ would emerge.

Neither Jessica nor I have any intentions to reinvent the wheel. That is to say, the patterns I use have been used before. Some of them I learned with Hannah. Others are taken from books or the net. However, the composition is totally ours and we love it.

Tonight we posted the first 10 rows. I have not been that excited since waiting for a test to be returned in school. Fortunately, all comments are positive throughout!! And I am very much looking forward to next Friday and the next 10 rows … 🙂