2012

I really love this pattern, but I’m finding that it is not nearly as striking done in the variegated yarn as it is done in contrasting solids like this one, so I am not loving this particular incarnation. This leaves me less than inspired to work on it, even though it is almost finished. I’ll get to it. Eventually. It’s too close to finished for me to frog without having a coronary, and I hate leaving things in limbo.

2014

I needed some mindless knitting to occupy my time for several periods of sitting in doctor’s office waiting rooms during a week away from home, so decided it was high time that this WIP got finished. It has been taunting me, tucked away in a corner under a pile of stash, for long enough.

I used a total of 588 grams for this blanket. I don’t really have a good estimation of how many yards of each yarn I used since I didn’t weigh anything before I started and I can’t even say for sure if I started with full skeins. I’m pretty sure that the variegated began as two full skeins, and if that’s the case, and the labels are to be believed, then that means I used 422 grams of the Rainbow and 166 grams of the blue. (I’m not sure I’m buying it. I think in reality the mix leans a little more heavily toward the blue than these numbers imply.)

One huge bonus to knitting this pattern with just 2 yarns - the blue for the “window frames” and the variegated for the “panes” - was that I only had 6 ends to weave in this time instead of 122 like in the first one I made. Huge bonus. I used this technique to carry the yarns up the side.

The blanket was knitted on a US 9 and was bound off with a US 10.5 and a stretchy bind off (k1, ~ k1, insert left hand needle into front of the two knit stitches and k2togtbl, repeat from ~). I didn’t measure this blanket before steam blocking, so I don’t know exactly how much I stretched it to get it to be 40”x46”. If I had to guess I would say that blocking added 6 or 8 inches to both the length and the width. I wasn’t overly aggressive, but I stretched it enough to open up the lace. I am pleased with the result.