April Design: Blanket

I didn't actually complete any original design projects in April. I spent the first week and a half working on a crochet project (the shawl referenced in my last blogpost, that I gave up due to shoulder pain), and I sprinkled in a few washcloths using patterns for circle designs in Nicky Epstein's book Knitting in Circles. But the only thing I designed I didn't finish until July 1st.

For my birthday I gave my family a GREAT list of suggestions for birthday presents (i.e. mostly yarn). One thing I asked for was yarn for a blanket with a few color suggestions. They got it for me, in a lovely brown. While the family was all over that night my brother-in-law asked me how long the yarn would keep me busy, and joked that it probably wouldn't keep me busy for long. I commented how it goes fast for the first couple of balls, but then gets really cumbersome and slow going.

I then made an off-hand comment about how if I did it in strips it wouldn't be so cumbersome and would knit up more quickly.

And so the wheels started turning. Why do strips unless you are going to make that part of the design appeal? What about stripes? What color could I add?

So, brown. It might be considered boring, but it really opens up the options when it comes to color matching. I love pink with brown, blues with brown, yellow and brown (yikes, listing all the options is almost making me reconsider my final choice), but my favorite (and my final choice) is green with brown.

The website that I bought the yarn from didn't have the exact color I wanted, so I ended up going with a color called Sea Glass.

Original plan: 8 inch stripes of brown in moss stitch, a simple but striking textured pattern, and thin, 2-3 inch wide stripes of green in a type of winding leaf pattern, with a line of green at the top and the bottom and a brown leaf edging past that.

Problem: leaf patterns in knitting require a lot of stitches to make them look detailed, and since I only wanted the green stripes to be 2-3 inches wide (which translates to 8-12 stitches since I was using bulky yarn and big needles), that wasn't going to happen. The pattern had to adjust, and changed to a green vine winding up it instead of leaves.

Fast forward a month and I got to the brown edging. I had a picture in my mind of the how the leaf edging would work, and I thought for sure I had seen an edging like that in my book of edging designs. Alas, it was not so. I tried a pattern I found online, didn't like it, tried making up my own, didn't like it, and then put down the project for a few weeks while I went on vacation.

Eventually I came back to it. I tried something else. Two or three times with different stitch amounts, increases, and decreases, to no avail. Leaves weren't going to happen. Sigh. So I gave up and picked a simpler edging.

Got about six inches into that and didn't like it, so undid it and picked my final one. Super simple, fairly classy, and now it is done.

I love it. The whole blanket. I'm so excited. I've even written up the pattern and plan on presenting it to Knit Picks (where I buy my yarn), to see if they will let me sell it on their website (they attach different pattern to their yarn lines).

Isn't it great? It turned out bigger than I expected, which makes me happy. I'm pretty sure I have my winter bed cover....