As my regular readers know, I like to use a lot of colors. I think using seven colors in an afghan is “limiting,” so when I read that newborns can only see black, white, and gray, I was not only shocked, I was disappointed.

My favorite blankets are about a million colors each, with swirls and circles and squares and rectangles, and I have designed crochet baby blankets around not only my cookie obsession:

but my rainbow obsession as well:

So you can imagine my sorrow when I learned that my color extravaganzas might not be the best practice for a crochet blanket for the first twelve weeks of a baby’s life.

However, after giving it some thought, I turned that sorrow into an opportunity, and it was with that in mind that this past weekend I picked up three skeins of yarn so that I could work on what I think of as a starter blanket for the first twelve weeks of life.

One with high contrast stripes in black and white, and — because I couldn’t resist — a red center.

I started with a red circle composed of three rounds of double crochet stitches and a round of what I call “half double slip stitches”:

The half double slip stitches add just a touch of textured and make it immeasurably easier to square off the circle without distorting the roundness of it:

but after I started crocheting the alternating black rounds, I decided that three rounds of white was one round too many, so I frogged my way back to the second round of the squaring off, and moved forward alternating black with white every two rounds.

Here is how the square looks when the final round is white:

and here it is when the final round is black:

I still have no idea which I prefer, but as I am planning on making the blanket 30 inches square, the size of the blanket will determine the color of the border.

And the upside to all of this?

The starter baby blanket is just for the first 12 to 16 weeks of life, so while the baby’s eyesight is maturing, you have extra time to work on a forever blanket for the baby in your life, and with a good washing and time to dry in the sun, the starter blanket can be passed on to another baby in need of a good start.