Aster Flower Baby Blanket in Loopy Mango Dream - Downloadable PDF

Aster Flower Baby Blanket in Loopy Mango Dream Yarn – Knitting Pattern Summary

The Aster Flower Baby Blanket is a charming, heirloom-quality knitted baby blanket designed by Loopy Mango and worked in their Dream Yarn, a 100% merino wool fingering-to-worsted weight yarn. The pattern is available as a downloadable PDF and is rated intermediate in difficulty, making it an ideal project for knitters who are comfortable with basic techniques and ready to explore a more decorative, textural stitch pattern. The finished blanket features a repeating floral motif created through a clever two-color construction, resulting in a soft, dimensional fabric that is both visually striking and gentle against a baby's skin.

Sizes and Finished Measurements

The pattern is offered in two sizes to suit different gifting or nursery needs:

• Small: approximately 20" (51 cm) wide by 22" (56 cm) long, requiring 4 balls of Dream Yarn
• Medium: approximately 20" (51 cm) wide by 32" (81 cm) long, requiring 6 balls of Dream Yarn

Both sizes cast on 97 stitches and maintain the same width, with the medium simply extending the length for a more generous lap or crib blanket.

Materials

This pattern calls for Loopy Mango Dream Yarn, a 100% merino wool yarn sold in 50 g (1.8 oz) balls with approximately 109 yards (100 m) per ball. The yarn is used in two colors throughout the blanket:

• Color A (Border Color): 2 balls for Small, 3 balls for Medium
• Color B (Flower Color): 2 balls for Small, 3 balls for Medium

The recommended needles are US size 10 (6 mm) circular needles, 32" (80 cm) in length. Circular needles are used here to accommodate the full stitch count comfortably, though the blanket is worked flat in rows rather than in the round. Merino wool is an especially popular choice for baby knits because of its natural softness, breathability, and temperature-regulating properties.

The Aster Flower Stitch

The centerpiece of this blanket is the Aster Flower stitch, a distinctive and decorative technique that creates small, raised floral clusters across the fabric. This stitch is worked over a two-row sequence and involves a specific method of manipulating stitches to form the petal-like effect:

• On the setup row, five stitches are knitted while wrapping the yarn twice around the needle for each stitch, creating elongated, loose loops.
• On the following row, those five elongated stitches are slipped to the right-hand needle, dropping the extra loops to create long, flowing strands.
• The five stitches are then slipped back to the left-hand needle, and the sequence P1, yarn over, P1, yarn over, P1 is worked across all five stitches together without removing them from the needle, resulting in five stitches on the right needle and a gathered, flower-like cluster.

This technique produces a beautifully textured, three-dimensional flower motif. Loopy Mango also provides a video tutorial for the Aster Flower stitch on their website, which is a helpful resource for knitters encountering this stitch for the first time.

Techniques and Stitches Used

The pattern draws on a combination of fundamental and intermediate knitting techniques. Knitters working this project will use:

• Knit (K) and Purl (P) stitches as the foundational building blocks of the fabric
• Slip stitch (sl), worked purlwise, which creates clean, neat edges and helps anchor the two-color design
• Yarn over (yo), used within the Aster Flower stitch to add extra loops that form the petals of each flower motif
• Double yarn wraps on knit stitches to create the elongated loops needed for the flower construction