Star blanket

My apologies for another long and inexplicable silence! I thought I would at least get another post up in January, but somehow we're already several days into February.

I haven't posted yet about the projects I worked on over the week and a half that we spent traveling for the holidays, so I'll start with this:

Crocheted star blankets pop up pretty regularly on Ravelry and on crochet sites, and they have always intrigued me, but I didn't know or have any small children of my own and I wasn't sure a bright, star-shaped little blanket was really something I needed for myself. Now I have a cat, though, and she loves blankets, especially ones I've crocheted. (My granny square afghan lives on the couch these days, and Juniper will always and only lie on it, even if it means squeezing on to the tiny corner of it that's not being used by someone else.) I wanted to make her a blanket of her own, so a star afghan, using some bright pink and purple acrylic that I bought on a whim, seemed perfect.

I think she agrees.

The particular pattern I chose is the Chromium Star Blanket by Laura Lynn Hanks. I picked this one for Juniper because it modifies the traditional ripple pattern to make a solid piece, rather than having the usual small holes at the peaks and valleys. I thought a solid blanket would work better for a cat - fewer places for tiny toes and claws to get caught.

Don't tell Juniper, but I did misread the pattern, and the blanket is a tiny bit awkward as a result. Every three or four rows, you're supposed to make fewer dcs in the points, which keeps the rows from expanding too quickly and getting rumpled. I anticipated this problem, but due to reading the pattern on a teeny, tiny smartphone screen, I didn't notice the fix for this that the designer cleverly put in the pattern. It would be nice if it was highlighted or something, because the written pattern is very repetitive, but I can't blame the formatting. When I finally noticed what I was doing wrong, I was on the verge of ripping out almost the whole thing, until I remembered that this was for a cat. I don't think she noticed the rumples.