When new babies come, it’s a good excuse to knit a project that is useful and hopefully will become something that the small child will find comforting and love for a long time. A simple baby blanket is a relaxing knit that you can do while you watch suspenseful TV shows and don’t have to pay attention to the pattern. It gives you a good excuse to binge-watch on cold winter weekends because you are doing something productive with your hands while your eyes are glued to the screen.

I wanted to make a blanket for my niece’s first baby. She knew she was carrying a baby boy. There are a lot of girls in our family on every single side, so this was pretty big news.  In a family that’s been swimming in warrior princesses for generations, I wanted to acknowledge the maleness of the child in the color of the yarn. Yes – I was getting blue yarn. But it could not be baby blue. I would not like to be knitting baby blue for as long as I would need to make the blanket. A small hat would be all I could handle of that color.

Baby D. in his blue-green blanket

I went to my local yarn store Downtown Yarns and went straight to the shelves of Malabrigo yarn. If all of the sudden, the universe told me that I could not knit with anything but Malabrigo yarns, I would be okay with it, that’s how much I love the feel and colors of Malabrigo. The shop’s owner Rita showed me a new line appropriately called Rios (rivers in Spanish). The colors give the illusion of ripples in a waterway or a watercolor painting. I picked the colorway Aguas. It is a blue green, like the colors of an ocean tidal pool or the edge of a clear pond. A very unbaby-like blue that’s perfect for a baby. The yarn is springy and soft and felt luscious running through my fingers as I knit. It is 100% superwash merino, so it is warm and machine washable as baby blankets should be.

Malabrigo Rios in Aguas seed stitch

Because a seed stitch is simply alternating a knit and a purl stitch all along a row, it is a good pattern for a beginner project that produces a nubbly texture that is both warm and visually interesting and also helps you to master the knit and purl stitches.

For a 36 inch by 36 inch blanket, I used 6 skeins of Malabrigo Rios in Aguas. I used 1 skein of a beautiful purplish blue colorway called Zarzamora for the crochet edging that blended beautifully with the color of the body of the blanket.

Here is the pattern:

6 skeins of Malabrigo Rios (or other Worsted weight yarn giving you a gauge of 5 stitches per inch)
1 skein for the crochet edging
Size 7 – 24” length circular needles
Size 8 crochet hook for the edging

Cast on 165 stitches. (for a seed stitch, you must always cast on an uneven number of stitches)

Row 1: knit one, purl one – all the way to the end of the row
Row 2: purl one, knit one – all the way to the end of the row

That’s it; you keep knitting those two rows till you get to however long you want the blanket to be.

I finished off the edges in a simple single crochet stitch.

single crochet stitch edge in Zarzamora