Fish Baby Blanket

A year or so ago, some friends and I made the infamous Fish Blanket as a group baby gift for another friend. (There's another version of the pattern available here.) It was fun to knit. It doesn't take much yarn to knit a fish, making it a good project for using up all those balls of scrap yarn.

I ended up being the person who had to join all those fishies together. It was quite a job since the fish were not uniform in size. My friend, Nancy, came over one day and helped me put it together. We laid all the fishes out on my kitchen counter and moved them around to get the best color distribution. Once that was done, we began sewing the fish together that were nose-to-nose. Then we unraveled the bindoffs on the tails and, using double points, did a 3-needle bindoff from the wrong side to join them tail-to-tail. Joining them into rows this way was as far as we got that day. I played with a number of different ways of joining the rows before I found one I liked. Below is what I came up with. I used a lighter weight yarn in blue to do the joins. It came out looking like waves which I thought was appropriate.

You’ll need a crochet hook and the yarn you want to use for joining. I used a sport weight yarn. Hold two rows rows of fish side-by-side and right side up. Hold the yarn behind the rows. Insert your crochet hook from the front through both chain stitch loops on the right side of a fish. Catch your joining yarn with your hook and pull a loop through to the front. You now have 1 loop on your hook.

Then go to the left side fish, insert your crochet hook through the loops on the side of the fish and pull up another loop. You now have 2 loops on your hook.

Pull up another loop from the fish on the right and then another loop from the fish on the left. Pull these two loops you just made through the two already on your hook.

Continue picking up one loop from each side and pulling them through the two on your hook. Don't pull it too tight! This can be a little tricky because of all the loops you’re working with. It does make a nice chain stitch over the seam and has the advantage of being a stronger and stretchier join than traditional seaming.

Once I had all the fish joined, I crocheted a single crochet edge around the entire blanket.

I got to deliver the blanket to the new mother and her baby girl. They both loved it!