So my husband’s friend’s son, Oliver, is turning 1 this week and they’ve invited us to his birthday party. Although the invitation did state “No gifts please” I felt bad about not bringing anything when we’ve received numerous gifts from them for our kids. What better gift than a handknit baby item?

When I received the birthday invitation, I had 4-5 projects that I was already working on but I tossed them aside and got right down to knitting this baby blanket. Unlike all the other projects that I was dilly-dallying with, this one actually had a deadline and I’m no speedknitter. It was an extremely easy pattern (5 rows/sts of garter stitch edging on all sides and all stockinettes for the rest of the blanket with the letter “O” in the center of the blanket) but it was taking me forever to knit this thing because I kept making silly little mistakes. I would frequently purl the garter stitches and then find out 4-5 rows down the line. I would fumble with the crochet hook to fix the error then make it worse and end up ripping out 5 rows. Repeat mistake 4-5 times and what I had was a colossal time-suck of sorts.

Well, I’ve got about 80 rows of 130sts to go until the baby’s birthday in 5 days. I better haul ass.