New blanket, new year

I started blanket #138 several weeks ago.  Progress has been slow because I didn't finish unravelling the two projects before I cast on.  Sometimes it works out like that.  This blanket is blue and brown with green and grey and a little rust for contrast.  The bright blue is a difficult colour and one that needs to be used up.  I like teaming it with brown, and something prompted me to add the rust.  It is fun knitting it, but it turns out a little bit too stripey.

I unravelled this charity shop find for it, a cowl neck sweater from Hoss.  The yarn is alpaca, two thin strands knitted together.  It will work as 4 ply.  This was easy to unravel, and the yarn is nice although too pale for this blanket.

The second project is a throw, 95 cms square, knitted from a lovely angora yarn.  It is knitted as a garter stitich square bordered by a garterstitch edging with points. This was slow to unravel.  The throw had been used and it had felted in the middle.  Starting it was not as difficult as I feared.  The edging was sewn on and I happened to come across an end that had not been fastened properly.  Unravelling was slow though; every stitch had to be torn apart.  The edging was even more difficult, with the cast off stitches in the point.  It is the kind of work I enjoy anyway, and now I have finished it.  The yarn is lovely and soft after washing, but most of the fluffiness has disappeared.

With the new year I have also done the sums for my 2010 knitting.  I used up 12.4 kg wool, less wool than in the previous two years.  Even so, that works out at 237gr per week or 34 gr per day.  In 2008 I used 13.0 kg and in 2009 13.8 kg.  There are two reasons why I knitted less wool in 2010.  The first is that I did not knit anything in chunky wool, and I did the two previous years.  The second reason is because of the timing of the blankets.  A blanket takes on average seven weeks to knit, so it depends on when in the year the blanket cycle starts, or ends.  Last year I finished seven blankets and I will finish the eighth by the end of January, I hope.  The previous two years I finished eight.  (There seems to be something odd with my maths here.  It looks as if I were lucky to complete eight in those two years, or the average has increased.)