The next blanket

The next blanket is another light coloured one.  It contains a lot of pastel shades - white, cream, yellow, pink, beige, grey, blue - with the exceptions of green and yellow; I have kept these to a minimum.  There is unfortunately a lot of synthetic in it.  I like buying bags of odd lots of yarn because it is so exciting sorting them out and finding out what is in them, but there is always white and pastel synthetic yarns.  A little synthetic is easily buried in the blankets, but now I have decided that I will have to ration them in future.  There is white here, but it does not show so badly.

The first garment that I unravelled I have already written about here when I was an active member of the Ravelry Thrifty Knitters group.  Nowadays I don't have the patience to follow the conversations, although they are interesting, and you will always learn something useful.  The soul searching about unpicking this has already taken place so I won't go over it again.  It is Zoe Hunt's Adult's Squares Jacket from her joint book with Kaffe Fassett Family Album.  The unpicking took some time.  I resorted to cutting the knots - you would have thought it was easy as the ends were not woven in, but the knots were strong.  The yarn - Rowan Botany 4 ply is so lovely, much thinner than their current 4 ply wool.  The cardigan uses all of 16 shades.

I went out and bought the second garment, because there was no suitable pastel coloured thin yarn in the yarn store.  I like buying and unravelling garments that are too expensive for me to buy to wear.  This is a man's All Saints pullover with a fair isle type yoke.  It has shrunk after washing but not so much as to make unravelling difficult.  The label says that the yarn is wool 55%, lambswool 23% and linen 22%, but it breaks easily, and I can't feel the linen.  It comes as two thin plyed strands knitted together, so I have divided them.  A thin yarn is often useful, and the oatmeal colour is great.