The Rishikesh Blanket

There are some times in life that are so special and so precious, like the first days with your newborn, that you hardly find words for them.

I will not even try to do it, but show you the last finished object before Carolina Aura was born, because that is quite an interesting thing, too.



The last weeks of pregnancy a lot of mamas, and I am no exception here, try and tie up loose ends, so that for the time of birth everything is ready and the nest is cozy. The last thing on my handmade agenda was the Babette blanket (I have written about it before here). There were quite a lot of loose ends that needed to be woven in. Nearly all of the squares were crocheted in the month November two years ago, in my time in Rishikesh/India. And it took me another two years to sew all those squares together and weave the ends in. Truly, most of the two years it just lay around out of sight (but in a distant corner of my mind)...

There seemed to be a secret connection between the blanket and the baby - the baby wouldn't come before the blanket was finished. Weaving in those ends and the last three endless rows of the double crochet border helped me with their boringness through the last sleepless nights before birth and helped me falling asleep again.

When my water broke on Sunday morning I thought I have to hurry now! Or maybe I could speed up the onset of labour with it. The blanket was finished at 11 am, but it would take another 21 hours before Carolina Aura was born (that would have actually been enough time to block the blanket...).



I call it the Rishikesh Blanket now - the colours of the borders have symbolic meaning: turquoise was my favourite colour when I first came to Rishikesh in 2004 and thought I will be back. Pink was my favourite five years later then when I did my International Kundalini Yoga Teacher Training in Rishikesh. And the last deep red row is the colour of Carolina's bootees. Ravelry notes here.

And with the rule "One project off the hook, next project on the hook" I started playing with the African flower hexagon.



There are two things I learned for the new project:

- ends don't get woven in by itself from just lying around or working on other projects
- so better start joining squares and weaving in ends as you go

PS: I might not have words, but I have a picture.



PPS: That blanket around Carolina is also from Rishikesh.