It’s finally done! The blanket that I started knitting in January has been bound off and blocked. I used up almost all of the yarn from my two advent calendars. That’s over a kilogram of yarn!
Back in January, I thought that it might be a nice idea to combine the handspun from my 2019 and 2020 advent calendars into one large project. I had previously spun up all the fibre samples into mini skeins of yarn, most of them fingering weight.
But how to combine them all, and not make the colours clash? And what should I make? Obviously something large, because I had 1100 grams of yarn. That’s like two cardigan quantities. My first thought was blanket, of course, but I briefly considered making a cape as well. But then I decided that I would like to do something with brioche and marled knitting, and it became too complicated to just wing it. So, a blanket it was!
I tried out a few variations of brioche stitches and settled on Stanton brioche. I combined that with marled knitting: I was always using two yarns for the main colour and two for the contrast colour. Because of that, the transitions were gradual and colours did not clash too much.
Some of the skeins of yarn were gradients, others were semi-solid, and I had to really plan my colour sequence carefully. During the project, I rearranged the colours a few times, so I didn’t stick to my initial plan entirely.
I knitted the blanket diagonally, increasing until I had used up half my yarn, then decreasing back to the opposite corner. I really liked how the colours flowed and played together. But the project took a long time to knit. Not just because it was so large… No, the blanket turned out to be quite magical!
Puk discovered that she really loved sleeping on the blanket! Whenever I pulled it out to knit, she would come running and sit on it. Which naturally meant that I could only knit one row, because I couldn’t turn the blanket over. I wouldn’t want to wake a sleeping kitten!
Pippi observed Puk sitting on the blanket in my lap, but she decided that she wanted to just keep snuggling up next to me. She’s a bit shy, after all.
Puk reallllly loved her blanket. Every evening she would sit there, purring loudly. Until…
Finally, Pippi decided that it was safe, and she hopped on and sat down! Once she had made her decision that my lap was safe, she turned like a leaf: she’s now way more enthusiastic than Puk about sitting in my lap. She doesn’t even need the blanket anymore to feel safe! Pippi is now a total lap cat. How’s that for a magical blanket?
Slowly but surely I made progress knitting the blanket. I started decreasing and after a while it became easier to just turn part of the work while Puk was sitting there. And then, finally, I arrived at the final stitches and bound off.
The blanket was huge! It turned out that it had become a diamond shape, but during blocking, I was able to force it into a square shape. We’ll see if that holds…
I had to use almost all of my blocking mats. I didn’t have enough blocking wires for all four sides, so I used some double-pointed knitting needles as well.
I really like the effect. While some of the mini skeins were gradients with multiple colours, I don’t think that they look bad in context. The general blanket gradient is still a rainbow from green to blue, and there is a nice balance between cooler and warmer colours.
Folded up, the colours look good together, they don’t clash. From a distance, they look more uniform than close up.
Once you get close to the blanket, you can see the foreground versus background contrast better, as well as the different strands of the marled knitting. Still, I think it works well. And the blanket is warm and cozy, perfect for cold evenings.
