This blanket was knit on US size 9 needles. I used a US size 10 for all the bind offs.

I pick up my stitches a little differently than suggested in the pattern. Along the sides of the garter stitch I pick up my stitches in the ridge bumps along the edge rather than between the ridges. The count is exact this way (no fudging necessary). I also use no knots.

Having already made one of these blankets which was seamed in black I knew before I began that I didn’t want to do that again, so for this blanket I left the stitches of the outermost row of all 4 sides of each block live and then joined the blocks using a 3-needle bind-off instead. I picked up and knit stitches in the bumps of the garter ridges at the ends of rows where necessary in order to have live stitches to use for the join, but I think that may have been a mistake as those short sections where the blocks come together are not nearly as neat and invisible as the rest of the seam. Maybe I should have just picked up stitches rather than picked up and knit, although that would have made it very tight to try to execute a 3-needle bind-off directly into those garter ridge bumps. Clearly my joining technique for perpendicular garter stitch is a work in progress, but that’s OK. I already have something completely different in mind for next time.

Since I was leaving stitches live on each block for joining I decided to leave the stitches live on all four sides of the blocks so that once all 12 blocks were joined I had live stitches all the way around the outside edge of the blanket. Then I did one continuous bind-off of the outside edge. I considered doing an I-cord bind-off, but it was getting too close to Christmas to add extra time to this project.

I thought that with the elimination of the individual bind-offs and seaming in favor of the 3-needle bind off, which binds off 2 edges and seams them simultaneously faster than I can seam with a darning needle, that I might save a few hours overall. It turns out that with all the moving stitches onto and off of waste yarn I ended up saving a sum total of about 38 minutes. That assumes that the amount of time lost or gained by my forgetting to start or stop the stopwatch on my phone is about the same for both blankets, so take it with a grain of salt. It also doesn’t include the 33 minutes that I knit a border on this blanket with a yarn I decided I didn’t like and then frogged.

134h