Christmas present
Blanket
Originally uploaded by me
While I was waiting for the plumber yesterday, I took some time to get some pictures off my camera and onto my flickr page. Some of the pictures related to the blanket that I made for Graham for Christmas.
Basically, I knitted 117 squares, 69 were white and 48 were black. (Here's an action shot of me knitting a white square. I'm watching Alias while I'm doing this, so, naturally, I'm wearing a wig.) It took me about a month and a half, and five "balls" of those One Pound skeins of yarn that you get at Michaels to knit the squares.
After I knitted the squares, I sewed the squares into 13 rows of nine squares per row using this pattern, that I made by just fooling around with an excel spreadsheet until I was happy with the outcome. I finished about four days before Graham came to Houston for Christmas. I gave it to him the Saturday before Christmas.
It's currently on the couch in the tv room. We usually cuddle under it while we're watching TV. Or it's used by others to rest upon.
The major lesson that I learned in making this blanket was that I should have either left the yarn much longer at cast on and cast off, so I could have used that yarn for sewing, or I should have included weaving in the excess as part of the making process. I ended up with a lot of excess yarn where four corners meet, and towards the end I got impatient and started tieing it off instead of weaving it in.
Still, it's a pretty awesome blanket, and I'm pretty proud of myself for pulling it off. It's about seven feet by five and a half feet. Plenty big for the two of us. But not quite the five.