New craft technique!

I'll be honest, I didn't think this up myself... I saw it on Pinterest.  But now I'm making it mine!  I tried it out on a baby blanket for a friend this past week, and it turned out great!  So much quicker than crocheting an entire baby blanket, but still turned out nice enough that I wanted to keep it!

Crochet an edge on a piece of fleece for a quick homemade blanket!  I used a piece of white and grey chevron fleece, roughly 30x36ish (I didn't really measure, just tried to square it up).  

Chevron fleece baby blanket with green and grey crochet border

I worked around the edge poking an exacta knife through the fleece roughly every 1/2 inch, leaving about 1/2 inch border so that the holes didn't turn into edge fringe.  I then worked all the way around doing single crochet, chain, single crochet, chain, etc as the base border (doubling up in the corners) and built upon that for decoration.  I was impressed with the way the back edge rolled nicely under the stitch, so that it didn't matter much if my exactly knife wholes were a consistent distance from the fleece edge.

I chose to do a round of * 2 double crochets, one half double*  in grey, then switched to bobbles for a backward round, singles to finish the bobble look, and then back to grey with a round of double half crochets for the border.  I think I used less than half a skein of either color yarn - mine were standard acrylic craft size yarn skeins, fancy yarns would certainly require more than one of those tiny skeins.

Bobble Stitches are easy and provide nice texture for babies!  For a typical double crochet stitch, you do yarn over, through, yarn over, pull through 2, pull through 2.  For a bobble stitch, you skip that last bit of a double crochet, just pulling through 2 loops ONCE.  Do this 5 times, and you'll end up with 6 loops on your hook - the last step of 5 different double crochets.  Then pull through all 6 loops at once, pull gently to tighten, and secure with a single crochet in the next space over.  Voila! Bobble complete!  Here's a link to another example of a baby blanket using the bobble stitch.

Closeup of the bobble stitch (my camera didn't want to focus)

After completion I washed on cold, and dried on a normal cycle, to make sure the new mom-to-be would be able to was up any baby stains without messing up her new soft baby blanket!

My mom also suggested the great idea of doing this on a bunch of smaller pieces of fleece and then putting them all together like a granny square afghan or quilt - I love the idea!!