Unconventional Baby Blanket

About 2 months or so ago, a friend approached me, wanting me to make a baby blanket. She had no specifications, and I asked her if she knew if the baby was going to be a boy or a girl. She said, a boy and they are naming him Marshall. I said ok and she proceeded to tell me that the father is a musician and they are naming him after the Marshall Amplifiers.

When I got home that night, my mind wouldn't stop thinking about this blanket. I had an idea to make an amplifier blanket. I discussed this idea with my husband, who is also a musician and has a fondness for Marshall Amplifiers and we both were very excited about this idea. Now I had to talk my friend into it. After all, Marshall Amplifiers, unless you are a musician, aren't very pretty or cute to look at.

I told my friend about the idea and even warned her that if we went through with it, it would not be received well at the baby shower by anyone but the parents. She saw how excited I was about this blanket and told me to go for it.

I picked up several skeins of different kinds of yarns to experiment with. I knew I wanted to do the tunisian stitch as that would give me the look I wanted - squares, lots of squares, to look like the front of the amplifier.

I made several swatches and asked hubby to pick out the best one. He chose the one made from Caron Simply Soft Heathers in Charcoal Heather.

After I worked up the blanket, I did an image search on the logo and worked up a chart using photoshop. I then got some graph paper and plotted out the name.

This next step almost derailed me and made me scratch the whole idea. Cross-stitch. I had never done this before. My first 3 attempts (yes, I said 3), I was making the xs INSIDE the squares. This produced a black outline of each x. Not an attractive logo.

I almost gave up.

I prayed and asked God to help me with this. I knew He gave me the idea for the blanket and wouldn't let me down when I was so close to being done. I was looking through some crochet magazines I have, just browsing through, unrelated to the blanket, when I came across a piece that had cross-stitching over an afghan stitch. This is what I needed! Although looking at the illustration completely confused me, I finally figured out how to make the xs on the afghan stitch.

After the name Marshall was stitched on, I bordered the blanket with a round of sc in Lion Brand Homespun, color Golden. I had brought my husband into Michaels' with me one day and told him to pick out any yarn, any color to border the blanket with. This is what he chose. I then followed that up with 2 rounds of hdc in the Charcoal Heathers.

I also made up a hat, hoping to cross-stitch the name Marshall on that, but my lack of skills in cross-stitching prevented that from happening. ;)