The Blanket of Knitting Growth

Finished at last!
This has been the longest project I can remember! I cast on the first time (yes, the first time, I'll explain in a minute.) on April 2012 and I finally finished just the other day, 10 August 2014. Wow. Over two years!

I'd already collected a huge amount of op shop yarn by 2012 and was beginning to wonder what to do with the various odd balls I was accumulating and I found the lovely blanket pattern Ten-Stitch Blanket by Frankie Brown which answered my desire to use lots of different yarns but no seaming together endless squares. I pooled together all the candidates for the project and began!

So far, so good but then I discovered the neat join from Smoking Hot Needles and instead of unravelling what I'd knitted so far and starting again with the nice join, I thought I'd get away with just starting the different join method and continue knitting. I worked doggedly on and this is what I got...

The whole thing had started to twist in a weird way and...I hated it! So with great reluctance (and a certain amount of kicking myself for not doing this when I first found the new join method) I unravelled the whole thing. All of it!

Then I balled up all the yarn again, graded it into colour blocks (sort of) and added more yarn that I'd missed before. It made up quite a nice palette.

So I started again! And it was already nicer, knitting up flatter and straighter than the first attempt.

I used up a lot of different weights of yarn. The thinner stuff I doubled (and sometimes tripled), the novelty yarns I used with a strand of solid yarn and just kept going round and round. It became that project that I had on the side when I wanted something mindless to knit between more structured knitting.

It continued as we moved from Walpole in the middle of the forest to Carnamah in the northern wheat belt.

There were long periods where I didn't touch this, where it sat in my wool room while I was occupied with other projects, usually smaller ones since as I continued knitting the blanket it became difficult holding it all on my lap. It was a great project to do during the winter though!

But since our latest move to Kellerberrin it had been living in a bag in a cupboard in my wool room and I finally took pity on it. I'd managed to go through all the balls of stash I'd assigned to this project and was up to the creams and white yarns. I had always planned to do the final round in black so I dragged the whole thing out and buckled down to finally finish it.

It actually didn't take that long which just shows how lazy I've been putting it off for so long. But the blanket was really heavy and cumbersome to work on now it's so big. But here it is, totally covering the floor of my wool room between the bed and the shelves. FINISHED!!

I used a huge number of yarns and some of them interpreted the ten-stitch pattern really differently to others. I wanted a better picture of the whole thing but the best I could do was once I'd washed it and hung it out to dry...the only way it was going to be blocked at all! I did toy with the idea of a tarp pegged out in the backyard, yarn threaded through the outer edge of the blanket and heaps of tent pegs but I gave that up as far more work than I was prepared to invest in!

 I am really, REALLY pleased with the final blanket. It is heavy, I'll confess but it feels so wonderful when you run your hands over it. So many textures! It's warm and cosy too! All I have to do now is tidy up the yarn ends at the back and then it is totally done. Now I'm finished I feel a bit flat. It's a bit of a let down when such a long time project is finally completed. But also pretty good too :)

Well, I must stop gazing obsessively at the thing and get on with my life....

....and start another project...Of course! :)

See ya later!

Dx