Hugs and kisses crochet blanket 20/10/24

Welcome to my first crochet along! Today we’ll start working on the free pattern “Hugs and Kisses” crochet blanket. In this blog post I’ll be sharing all the information you need to get started and posting my progress and sharing my colour palette. Let’s get started! The pattern can be found on “the crochet crowd.com” link here https://yourcrochet.com/5-incredible-hugs-and-kisses-baby-blanket-ideas-you-will-love/   and a video tutorial on their YouTube channel link here https://youtu.be/iqR_iQWDY6U?si=0E-8H4rcwKQRBVMh and there is also a chart! Let’s start with my project page and colour palette.

My project tracker sheet

The pattern is in multiples of 28 plus 18 stitches. My last blanket that I made which was a great size for a single bed was around 130 stitches. The best match for me is 140 plus 18 which ends up being the suggested 158 chains. Today I’ll be following the YouTube tutorial through each round, after that I’ll continue with the chart. I’ll be starting with white, my inspiration picture appears to use one colour per pattern repeat. After 2 hours this is my progress. I’m not yet finished the YouTube tutorial but so far it’s very interesting and I can’t wait to finish the first pattern repeat and start the next colour!

The first few rounds

26/10/24

Tonight I spent 2 hours working on my blanket! I finished the tutorial with my white yarn and changed to the next colour. I had the pattern memorised after the tutorial and I was able to continue the next section by looking at my previous work in the white section. My work went a little awry on the bobble stitch round, this was a little harder to memorise because I’m confused with adding the extra stitches on the ends AND the row starts with 1 half double crochet, bobble and then 2 half double crochet between each bobble until the end and finish with 1 half double crochet. Everything was ok though because every alternate row is single crochet. What I did was I counted the stitches during the single crochet rounds and just increased or decreased stitches evenly until I had the correct amount of stitches for the next row, you can’t even tell that I fudged it! So far I’m loving the texture of this blanket and I love that the backside is completely flat.

Nearly through all of the colour pallet

The colour way is Turing out so pretty with this pattern and I’m so happy so far. I’ll be finishing up for tonight because I’m falling asleep! See you soon!

13/10/24

I’m really mothering along now with the blanket and I’ve spent around another 4 hours (2 nights this week working 2 hours before bed time) and this is my progress. On the balls of yarn that were unused before starting this blanket, there is so much yarn left on the skein! I am planning to do the entire colour pallete 3 times and adding a simple boarder of white double crochet and then a stripe of each colour between white in single crochet stitches. I am in love with the texture of this blanket and finding that I don’t have to fudge the single crochet row to make sure I have the right stitch count quite so often. I do find that I have to keep counting my single crochet and cross stitch rows to make sure I have 12 stitches on the main rows and 5 stitches on the outside rows otherwise things do go awry again! But over all I’m very pleased and I predict that this blanket is NOT a yarn eater and will only take one skein of each colour to complete, that’s only 6 balls of yarn and not the usual 10!! Let’s see!

17/10/24

Yahoo! We’ve made it through all the colours and back to white! I’m so pleased with the way this colour pallet is looking and as I continue to crochet I wonder… should I give this one as a gift or keep it for myself? This project does take many hours to complete and I have no doubt that I’ll be making another one as soon as I finish this one! If I do, I’ll be keeping a better record of how many hours have actually gone into this project and I’ll add it to my project sheet. This photo is taken after approximately another 4 hours of crocheting.