My notes and mods, including Intarsia tips

As others have commented, 2000 miles of stockinette (give or take a mile) can get very tedious. I’m pleased with the finished result, however, and I’m inordinately proud of my first ever attempt at Intarsia. If I’d have stuck to the pattern the letter would have been only 5”, which I felt (along with other Ravellers) would have been lost in the vast sea of stockinette, so I made my own 8” grid - more on that in my mods below.

The final blanket size changes at each measuring, today being 28 miles wide and 37 miles high. OK then, let’s call them inches. It may gain or lose an inch or two tomorrow, depending how argumentative it feels - and believe me, it does have a mind of its own. If I were ever to make this blanket again I would go with machine-washable merino wool. The cotton/acrylic yarn recommended in the pattern is cool to the touch (I’d prefer something snuggly and warm for a baby) and it magnifies every tiny imperfection. I joined new yarn only at the garter edges, thinking it a good idea to use a tip I’d read about - knit both the new yarn and the tail end of the finished ball together for a few stitches. If you look not that closely you can see every single time I joined new yarn. And there are a lot of joins! Infuriatingly, I’ve never dealt with so many knots in each ball, so I had to keep unpicking to get back to the beginning of a row when an unexpected knot appeared. Only one of my 8 balls was knot-free, and two balls had more than one knot. So here’s the tip I kept forgetting to do: try and remember to unwind roughly a row’s length of yarn before you start a new row to avoid having to unpick a part-row.

Now for my mods:

• Cast on 120 rather than 130 st (surprisingly, there still wasn’t much yarn left over from the 8 balls)
• Increase the number of garter stitch rows - 16 rows top and bottom, 8 st either side (9 would have been better)

The Intarsia ‘A’: this measures 8” wide and nearly 9” high when it’s not arguing with my tape measure. I made an image in Photoshop using the font College Slab, a big fat font that reminds me of the chunky lettering you see on baby alphabet blocks, perfect for baby-wear. Then I uploaded this image to the Knitpro site using the following settings:

Grid size: Regular (48w x 64h)
Stitch size: Knit Landscape (7:5)

This gives a 52-row, 34 st wide grid, and with my gauge in mind I was able to work out exactly when to start intertarsing. For my letter to sit in the middle of the blanket I needed to start it when my knitting reached 14”, allow 8 or so inches for the Intarsia, then knit another 14” of stockinette. (If you want a shorter blanket just start the Intarsia earlier. As long as you knit the same length of stockinette after your letter, it will sit in the middle of the blanket.)

If any Ravellers would like me to make a letter using the same font, ready to upload to Knitpro, just yell - it will take me a jiffy and I’d be happy to help. By the way, my knitted ‘A’ looks slightly different to the image because I can’t leave well alone.

All the letters come to roughly 8 and a bit inches high depending on gauge. The width will vary depending on the character, with A, M and W being the widest at around 8”.

January 2016: It was worth the pain. It turns out that this blanket is by far the most useful gift that the parents had been given. They use it not just as a covering but for wrapping the baby too, and it’s in use every single day. It washes beautifully too.