05-17-2017

Ack! Just noticed an egregious mistake and had to rip it back to before the picture I added at the beginning of the month. Sigh. I need to review Mikey’s video to make sure I know where to start when I finish each round. Mikey says to cut off and start at the corner and I was trying to avoid that by slip stitching to the corner, but I guess slip stitching to the next corner isn’t the right idea. This color changing yarn makes this a bit harder to figure out.

05-27-2017

I finished the first Caron Cake today. Three more to go! It measures almost 24” so the final blanket would be 4’ square which is fine for a lap blanket.

Note: I got 183 blocks out of the first cake, so I need to calculate how many rounds to make to be sure I save enough yarn to fill in the half blocks to make the edges straight.

Because I’m a math nerd, here is the formula for how many total blocks there will be where r is the round number:

B = 2r² - 2r + 1

And here’s the formula for how many blocks per round:

b = 4(r - 1)

If we have enough yarn for 183 x 4 = 732 blocks:

19 rows would be 685 blocks, leaving enough yarn for 47 blocks. I need half of the previous round’s blocks’ amount of yarn to fill in, which is 4(18 - 1) / 2 = 34. So, if I stop at round 19 and then fill in, I should have plenty of yarn with even enough for a final crab stitch border. (Who says you’ll never use algebra once you leave high school?)

05-30-2017

The picture on the car hood shows the size after just starting the second cake of yarn, which is just starting round 11. (The gray squares on the last round are from the current cake.) The picture after that shows how I’m slip stitching back to the previous corner when starting a new round. It is quite noticeable (as Mikey warned) but, since this isn’t for a gift, I’m fine with how it looks.

07-31-2017

Just two more rounds of squares added since the last update. This is a “slowly but surely” blanket.

08-17-2017

I finished the second cake this morning. This is really turning into a soft, cozy blanket.

09-18-2017

I added two more rounds this weekend, so now I’m at 15 with about 1 1/2 cakes left. I’ve decided that this is my practice blanket. The slip stitches to start each round are not elegant, but I’ve concluded that if I flip the blanket over and slip stitch up the back to the corner of the square I just did, it is just fine.

10-30-2017

I have just started round 16 of the squares (of 19) but it’s time to put this aside for a while in order to finish some other things. I have added a picture of the front on the seam where I’ve switched to slip stitching up the back of a square at the beginning of a new round so you can see what it looks like. This is a note to myself that when I make another one of these in color changing yarn to do this same method.

11-21-2017

I finished after round 18 because I wasn’t confident of my math skills (and because I was ready to be done with this blanket). Mr. B has claimed it.