Some kind of blanket

Recipient: Unknown
Designer: Moi
Pattern: Untitled
Completed: August 24, 2007
Colours: Canary yellow
Yarn: Zellers 100% acrylic sportweight
Completed status: Mommy-to-be loved it!
Pictures:

full view


quarter view


closeup

2007-Aug-28

Huge credit has to be given to my husband for my actually being able to finish this on time. I told him about nine days before the shower that I had badly underestimated how much time there was left (which makes me very dumb, since I was completely aware of the date of the shower...I guess I just never put two and two together to realise how many days I had left) and that the coming week would be filled with Panic Knitting. So he enabled my panic bee-yew-tifully by taking the kids more often and not complaining about the lack of clean laundry. He was great, and I was able to make my 'stitch quota' each day and get it all done on Friday. It got washed on Sunday before being wrapped up.

I'm very very happy with it, although there are a few noticeable bits of fluff left on it from the provisional cast-on that piss me off, but what can you do, hopefully that will go away with use and more washing. As well, the gauge of the graft is not perfect, but again, hopefully use and washing will do the trick by evening out all the stitches. And I don't think the recipient noticed - she really seemed to love it, even though it turned out waaay bigger than I had intended! She even left a thank-you comment in my last post. (You're totally, totally welcome. Despite the panic, it was an absolute pleasure. :)

Anyway Em, I'm really sorry I didn't get out to the SnB on Wednesday (especially since I missed Mel, phooey), but this blanket is why - last time I was there I didn't get any knitting done, and I just couldn't afford that this past week. Hopefully I'll be out again soon!

The only question left now about this project is what to do with the pattern. I was thinking of writing it up and asking Knitters Attic to try and sell copies, but now I'm thinking, maybe the construction of the blanket is unique enough that Knitty would be willing to use it? I don't know. I'll have to ask Amy. But then I start getting paranoid that she'll think I'm some crazy blanket-obsessed person who keeps submitting blanket patterns in the hope of wearing her down. Ack! I'm going to have to figure out how to word what I'm going to say or write to her so she doesn't think I'm heading up some kind of baby blanket special interest group lobby.

Either way, I'll need to do up another one as my model for the completed project shots. This is not a hardship since I'll be able to use it for my own baby.

2007-Aug-20

This project is another reason I've been holing myself up in the house. I'm nervous that I'm very, very doomed. I've only recently hit the halfway point of the blanket, and yet I've got to complete it (including grafting 99 stitches) before Sunday at noon. Throw in a teething-cranky baby, the need to bake banana coconut squares for the shower, and losing a day of knitting between now and the shower to an all-day family reunion, and you start to see why I'm desperately nervous. I calculate that I have something in the neighbourhood of 36,000 stitches to knit before I can even start the grafting. I am in full-on panic mode.

2007-Aug-7

I decided to go with another baby blanket as the second gift for the double baby shower I'm going to at the end of August. So I plugged some texture and cable motifs into my plan for a mitred baby blanket, and - tadah! A pattern. This morning I cast on (provisionally) and got going. I think it'll look nice.

2007-May-14

Here's a shot of the swatch I made (please ignore the crappy grafting job:


I'm going to do another swatch, this time knitting it clockwise so that the decreases on the "spines" will be K2togs. (My left-leaning decreases always come out disgustingly uneven, I have no idea why. It doesn't matter if I do K2togtbls, SSKs or Sl1/K/PSSOs, it always looks bad.)

2007-May-10

This is mostly just a sparkle in my eye at this point. For a few days, I've been mulling over an idea for a new method of blanket construction. This morning I woke up determined to test-drive the idea. I haven't taken a picture yet, but the test piece worked out really nicely and I'm very excited about it (visuals coming soon). Knitting being as old and popular as it is, I'm sure that I'm not the first person to have invented this, but I'm still pretty high on myself at the moment for having thought it up my very own self. :) The inspiration came from a pattern I have by Elsebeth Lavold, where she uses short rows to go around corners for an edging, and uses cables to hide the lines of short row shaping. With what I've done, the edging IS the entire blanket, and I use lace to hide the lines of short row shaping (if that makes any sense). I'm pretty excited by the possibilities and will probably be experimenting a bit with this.

Labels: mitredblanket