The Blanket: Some Bits

A log-cabin bit that may yet get dramatically increased in size:




A funny silly piece that is sort of a mini-version of the whole blanket – experimenting with different shapes to make smaller bits that get joined with the other bits:



A miter, a bias square, and two garter stitch squares made of 4 smaller squares each, using the two primary colors of the blanket (the copper and the green) paired with the same set of 4 accent colors, and knit and joined (picked up) in the same fashion. In fact, everything’s the same except in one, the accents are striped in every 2nd row, and in the other, the accents are striped in every 2nd row only for the last few rows of each square.

The Blanket: An Introduction

Many moons ago, I learned that one of my very favorite people in the whole wide world was getting married (she's gone and done it already, now), and I wanted to get her or make her something extra super special. I was sort of starting to consider making her a blanket, because one of my favorite wedding gifts was this blanket from my father:



A nice blanket is a good wedding gifty kind of thing. Substantial, lasting, keeps them warm, it's something for them to use together. The kind of thing that might fall out of daily use, but you'll be using it for guests or picnicing or whatever 20 years later and say "That was a gift for our wedding." But that's a whole mother lode of knitting, and a lot of yarn dollars, and a big commitment. I am TOTALLY into the idea of making quilts, but I haven't actually completed any just yet, and didn't want to get into a big mess of trying to make my first quilt and face all of those disasters that are bound to happen and try to get it all just right and then give away my very first quilt ever. It's going to be a labor of love and intensity and also probably that 'child only a mother could love,' that first quilt. I would feel bad for me AND for them to give them my first.

I'd been getting into trying out different things with knitting, different stitch patterns, different shapes (miters! log-cabins! short-rows!). I love designing and thinking about design and seeing other people's designs and wondering how they came up with them. I often love really complicated things but I have a hard time imagining how I could sit down and think up the details of a really big, complex design that has lots of "randomness" and isn't too uniform but all still really works together. But oh! There's color - it's sort of the cheap trick of tying things together. Take three of anything in three different shades of blue with different patterns that don't match at all. Add two more in other shades of blue and you've gone from "mish-mash" to "lovely coordinated set." So I could just knit a lot of stuff with some common/coordinated colors and it would all come together, somehow, right?

Right. Smiley's sale. Intriguing green yarn. Interesting copper color. Check is exchanged for a GIANT bag of bags of yarn. Mix-it-up additional colors are added from friend's leftovers, Elann purchases, and my stash. And because it's not enough to knit an entire blanket, I will felt it a little at the end.

Last week, I pulled out all the bits I've got so far, and here's where we sit.



That is to say, with both a Good Beginning and a Long Way To Go.

Dedicated to Kay & Ann

Kay & Ann have had one of my favorite knitting blogs for a long time, Mason-Dixon Knitting.

They got me back into a big knitting swing with their Afghans for Afghans project by collecting 8"x8" squares that were then sewn together and sent off to Afghanistan. They put together a fantastic book that has created a storm: a knit-along blog , a flickr gallery for projects from the books. I've met them both, and they're also just lovely people.

I love their stuff, I love them, and I love to give them a hard time about sewing in the ends of their knitting (machine stitch and cut! I say), so this post, and especially this picture, is dedicated to them.



Just to be very, very explicit: I made it that way On Purpose.

Stay tuned to see what happens to THAT piece.

From Read-Only to Read-Write

After years of blog-surfing, I'm finally going to start a little blog-posting.

Lots of knitting, sewing, thinking, linking is