When I was a newbie knitter, I saw this project and thought it seemed fun. I grabbed the nearest needles and random acrylic yarn and test knit a fish. Then I knit another, and another. The first three are all the same shade of pink, vaguely middle-ish right hand corner - then came a few yellow fish, just to see how they look together and tesselated… and suddenly I had 7 or 8, with no plan of action concerning how big the final project would be, or how the colours would go together - it just kept on growing.

This was my first “proper” large-scale project, and still the biggest I’ve ever done. It was a learning curve, and there are bits that are messier than I would like, but I love it.

It’s 12x16 fish, which makes 192, although I probably knitted 200 in total, as there were a few that I couldn’t place in the final version or just ended up slightly too big. I’ve never got around to measuring it (I don’t really own big enough implements to do this easily!) but it covers a double bed.

I know for many people a blanket like this would be a stash-busting exercise, but for me it ended up being a stash-creator. I had a little acrylic stash when I started, and I brought a few skeins of yarn for the purpose, but I also brought a lot of oddments from ebay to get the range of colours without totally busting the bank. I must have helped other people de-stash, but I still have crazy amounts left. I guess that means I shall just have to make another one day!

I had a wonderful time thinking about colours and how to arrange the fish, but I eventually settled on diagonals of dark and light with a gradual transformation of colour across the blanket. I think having the dark/light theme helps bring all the different colours together even if the effect in some places isn’t very dramatic. (I think there’s one shade of blue and possibly a pink that in one place is a light and another is a dark - ssh!)

August 2008 - Finally got around to uploading some pictures of the finished piece. It is so big that it seems impossible to capture the whole thing in one raverly sized picture, so we have a couple that show the various corners, and some distant shots that give a better impression of the colour changes across the blanket.