Helping a friend...

Hello lovelies, hope the weather is treating you kindly!  We've had some Arctic winds here and a little snow over the last week-almost made me wonder whether I'd dreamt the Spring!  But thankfully it's starting to warm up a little :-)

It's amazing to me that I've been crocheting for over 2 years now.  I still feel very much like a beginner-perhaps because I don't stray far from my comfort zone (Granny Squares Hooray!) but I was reminded recently that I'm not really a beginner any more-I should really think of myself as 'intermediate'.

A lady I know through a close friend recently got in touch about some problems she's having with a crochet project.  She's been crocheting for about a year and when she started, she wanted to make a baby blanket for her nephew.  Well, she's been working on this blanket for so long, having to frog it and restart it over and over again that the baby is now nearly a year old and what was once a labour of love is now a massive burden.
So she asked me whether I would mind finishing it for her (btw she suffers from EDH and her joints get REALLY painful after too much crocheting) and she brought round what she'd done along with all the yarn.
This is the pattern she was using...
It's described as an easy pattern and I suppose she's right.  However, it's done almost entirely in single crochet so it takes FOREVER to make even a few inches of depth, let alone enough for a cot blanket.  Plus, it is a 'self bordering' pattern and the way it's done is to alternate using single crochet and half double crochet for the first and last 5 stitches of each row.  This tends to play merry hell with the width.  The main part of the pattern goes for a 'crinkle' effect by putting 1sc, ch2, 1sc into each space which takes even longer and the amount of yarn it uses is insane!
While it is a very easy pattern to follow, I think it needs some revision-a beginner trying to make a blanket from this would get disheartened very quickly!

So, the first thing I noticed it that instead of putting 1sc, ch2, 1sc into each space, she was putting 1sc into a space, chaining 2 and putting the next 1sc into the next space so it wasn't looking right at all.  So I started from scratch and quickly discovered that it would take weeks of crocheting to get it to the right length plus for some unknown reason, it kept getting wider and wider!

I spoke to her and asked whether she'd mine if I played with the pattern a bit.  She was fine with that so instead of using single crochet, I opted for using double crochet shell stitches and changed the alternating rows to just dc stitches.  The result was a blanket that didn't take more than a week to complete and has a lovely ripple effect.

Here's some photos for you so you can see what I'm rambling on about :-)

This is a little sampler of the pattern I made to show my friend what it should look like.

This is what my friend had done so far-this had taken many frustrating months and still was less than 1/3 along...

This is what I came up with-it measures approx 30" by 37" so it should fit a standard cot bed.  Hopefully she likes it :-)