I’ve been away from the Studio for a few days. Not far away, in front of the TV in fact so that I can listen to daytime telly drivel while I have been beavering away. I’ve been making a baby blanket ready for a new arrival later this year. 

After a couple of false starts, I ended up using Tunisian simple stitch to make 63 squares, each taking 20-25 mins to do once I got the hang of them. I stitched them together with double crochets. Total time taken roughly 26 hours. The Spiin yarn is lovely to work with, with uniform diameter, resistant to splitting and fluffing, and relatively soft on the hands. I used a larger diameter hook (6mm) as recommended for Tunisian crochet rather than the 4mm needle size suggested on the yarn band.

I worked out by trial and inadvertent melting that the best way of ironing the squares flat (as they wanted to curl naturally due to the Tunisian stitch I used [see here]) was to press reverse side up under a wet cloth using a hot iron – it seems the steam is what makes the difference and the cloth means your base plate doesn’t end up melting the acrylic yarn. Being acrylic, the resulting blanket is machine washable, ideal for use with babies.

The Spiin yarn comes in a variety colour pack of 20 x 100g balls and is available exclusively from Amazon.