My Dad told me once that he considered parenting to be a slow retreat, and I think that is an apt metaphor until your children go off to college or move out and start working. I know that I wasn’t ready for the overwhelming responsibilities of cooking, cleaning, working, bill paying, leak fixing, appliance repairing, car maintaining, and light bulb changing that being completely on my own would require. Despite my best efforts, I don’t think that my kids were ready either, and I’m not sure anything can prepare you for that total launch moment. When I go on walks, the leaving the nest metaphor hits me hard every time that I see a baby bird that hasn’t made it. It makes me sad thinking about both the baby and mama birds.

Just like the Mama bird knows the dangers of predators and lack of food and cold facing her fledglings, parents think about the dangers facing their children. We’ve all seen good people get caught up in bad things, and as parents, we have battled challenges of our own. To paraphrase the Rascal Flats song My Wish, we want our children’s dreams to stay big and their worries to stay small and for them to never have to carry more than they can hold. One thing that is probably hard for our kids to fully understand is that we see their gifts and talents and know that even with bumps and setbacks that they are ready to take on the world.

And like Rascal Flats also sang, while they’re out there getting to where they are getting to, we want them to know that somebody loves them, and what better way to show them than with a homemade blanket made with love in every stitch?

I made my son this rugby striped throw in his school colors when he went off to college using the Hibernate Blanket pattern that I found on the Yarnspirations website. The best part about this pattern is that Mikey from The Crochet Crowd has made an excellent tutorial video that you can use as a guide if you need extra help. The details of what I did differently are in the instructions at the bottom of this post.

If this post inspires you to make something for someone you love, it will help me with my Rascal Flats inspired goal of helping someone every chance that I get too.

Instructions

Bernat Hibernate Blanket Pattern
8 mm crochet hook
Bernat Blanket Yarn in Crimson, Country Blue, and Vapor Gray
(The pattern as written calls for 6 skeins total of Bernat Blanket yarn in 220 yd/300 g balls to make a 52″ x 60″ blanket. Unfortunately, I did not write down how many skeins of each color that I used, so I would suggest estimating by using the total number of rows in each color.)
Ch 120
Begin pattern in *Country Blue and continue for 16 rows.
Make 2 rows of Vapor Gray, 16 rows of Crimson, and 2 rows of Vapor Gray.*
Continue from * two more times.
Finish with 16 rows in Country Blue for a total of 4 big stripes in Country Blue, 3 big stripes in Crimson, and 6 narrow stripes in Vapor Gray.

For the border, sc around the entire blanket in Vapor Gray making 3 sc in each corner to turn.

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