Babies, Harry Potter, and Batman

Babies.

So many babies.

In the last 3 years I have made 8 baby blankets as baby shower gifts. Baby showers and 1st birthdays is what really kick-started my crocheting spree of late. It’s weird being in a baby shower lull, right now… I feel like I’m forgetting someone I know who is pregnant who I should be making a baby blanket for!

One of my favourite baby blankets that I have made was for my cousins son, Shepherd. My cousin, Elise, and her husband, Josh, are two of the nerdiest people I know. Batman, Superman, Wonder Woman, Dr. Who, Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings… you name it. So guess what the theme of Shep’s nursery is? Anything geek. It’s a glorious combination of all of the aforementioned geeky-ness.

Shortly after I found out Elise was pregnant (and way before I knew the nursery theme), I was browsing around online looking for ideas on baby blankets and I found one that had owls sitting on little branches stitched onto the blanket! It was perfect. Elise has loved owl prints since before they were as popular as they are now. The pattern is for sale on Etsy for $8 and it comes as a nifty downloadable PDF. I bought it immediately. I was still in the middle of making a baby blanket for a friend (to be posted about at a later date), so I waited to buy the yarn for Elise’s baby blanket, which was good – it gave me time to decide on the colors I wanted to use and also gave enough time for a nursery theme to be decided on.

Then, the theme came: anything geek. I was a little bummed because owls wouldn’t fit into that, and I so love making theme-matching baby blankets! But I decided to make it anyway because Elise would still love it. As I cogitated on how to make it geeky and what colors to use (I needed two), I decided on red and yellow – the colors of Gryffindor from Harry Potter. There were two owls on the blanket so I decided I would make one of them a snowy owl with yellow eyes to match Hedwig (Harry’s owl) and the other would just have to be a random barn owl, or something, which didn’t really sit too well with me.

Scops owl

Over time, I related my woes about owl #2 to my brother, who very quickly said “Didn’t Ron have an owl?” Ding! That was it. He did! A tiny little scops owl named Pigwidgeon. Done and done.

Finished! I was and am so happy with it, and Elise and Josh loved it.

My moms dog, Sadie, laying on the blanket as I was trying to stitch everything on. It’s a good thing she’s cute…

The yarn I used was Hobby Lobby’s I Love This Yarn, which is accurately named, by the way. I use I Love This Yarn for everything I make, unless I need a specialty yarn. It’s a good-sized skein (7 ounces!), inexpensive, SO soft, and comes in a billion different colors (exaggerating for emphasis, of course). The stitch pattern is the lemon peel stitch (I just found out its name the other day. So cute!), which is a double crochet (dc) and single crochet (sc) alternating across the whole row. Here’s a tutorial for it! The border for the blanket is a rope border, which I love and hate at the same time. The end result is super cool, and once you get the hang of making it it becomes second nature, but starting it is always a bit of a cringe-worthy event for me, as rope borders are crocheted backwards. But, I vanquished that sucker and made a pretty cool baby blanket.

The pattern makes a 32″ x 32″ blanket, but I wanted a bigger one. I love the idea of oversized baby blankets, because then the parents can use it too. I added about 25 more chains to the foundation, added one more row to all of the striped sections, and added 3 more rows to the center red section.

Along with the Harry Potter baby blanket, I also wanted to make Shepherd a diaper cover and hat. I had seen a number of Batman diaper covers on the internet and knew that that was what I wanted to make. I had also seen these batman hats that I just had to make.

Close-up of Batman hat

Front of diaper cover

After searching for a while I came across this video tutorial on how to make the hat and it was perfect. There’s a link in the description of the video for adjusting the size of the hat to fit everyone.

Earrings as stitch markers

Funny little story: I was making this hat in the car, and when it came to making the eye holes I needed a stitch marker so I could keep track of all of the stitches, but I had nothing! I was wearing dangley earrings at the time, so I ended up using those! When in need, right?

This is the base pattern I used for the diaper cover. It has a stitch that I had never come across before, a linked double crochet (ldc), and it gave a really unique texture to the diaper cover.

Here is where I found the pattern for the Batman symbol. It took me so many times to make the symbol… I think I made it and took it out again about 6 times. It’s not that it’s complicated, it really isn’t; I think I just overthought it and couldn’t straighten my brain back out again. But, eventually, I got it and it looked pretty cool. There’s also a pattern for the oval on the same website as the logo.

As strange as it feels to not be making anything for anyone else right now, it’s given me a chance to finish up some other projects I’ve had lying around and start some others that I’ve been wanting to play with for a little while now. I may or may not have ordered some super chunky yarn and big, fat hooks to make a super chunky blanket for myself…. The yarn was on sale, plus I had a coupon! What can I say??

Here’s some really cute pictures of Shepherd to finish off this post. Thanks for reading!

Daddy keeping Shep warm

Shepherd chewing on my toe. That didn’t last long. Ouch.

THOSE CHEEKS.

Shepherd laughing a mommy, who was making funny noises