Baby Blankets: An Average

So I'm working on designing a blankie for my cousin Becky's baby, and as usual I am stumped by the fact that I'm not sure what size to make it. Nothing I'm crocheting looks quite right, and I don't have any receiving blankets on hand to base it off of, like I usually do.

Brilliant me decided to go to Crochet Pattern Central's baby afghans page and see what was there. This somehow morphed into the idea of getting the measurements off of all the blankets with measurements and then averaging them.

I left off patterns that required registration, and anything that was obviously not a "normal" size (there were a couple that purported to be for car seats). After I assembled my list, I knocked the highest & lowest values off both measurements. This left me with 63 numbers, ranging from 25" on the width side on up to 50" on the height side. (Yeah, that'd be an interesting-looking afghan!)

Anyway, a little time with the calculator later, & this is what I came up with for an average baby blanket: 33" wide by 38" long (both rounded off).

I am publishing this because I know that the question of what size to make baby blankets has popped up many a time on Crochetville. My number, of course, is as arbitrary as any other, but it does seem like a handy size just by looking at it.