New year, new blanket

Christmas and the New Year are over, and it is back to every day routine.  I started my new blanket several weeks ago, and now it is nearly finished.  This time it is back to dark colours, my favourite brown, grey and black with some green and teal.  I am knitting this one with size 4.5 mm needles again, because I thought most of my dark yarns are aran weight.  It is not necessarily so, but I quite like the effect I get with the larger needles.  I do mean to get back to double knitting weight blankets on 4 mm needles in time.

I don't like the bright teal colour, and soon I will have finished this particular lot of teal wool, and I will be pleased.

The first jumper that I meant to unravel for this blanket I changed my mind about.  It is this Paul Costello chunky jumper knitted in tweed yarn.  The yarn is lovely, and it is in the mink colour that is one of my favourites.  But I didn't examine it thoroughly enough when I bought it - the seams are serged, so it would mean short ends of yarn and a lot of fastenings of ends.  For a long time I thought I would unravel it anyway, because the yarn is so nice.  But there is so much yarn in the wool store that I really don't have to do it.  So it has gone back to the charity shop, and I hope somebody will enjoy wearing it.

The one that I did unravel is this Marks and Spencer big man's cardigan.  It is a nice grey colour, in pure wool that felt nice.  The yarn turned out to be double strands of 4 ply shetland wool, a pleasure to knit with after separating the strands.  The cardigan was very easy to unravel too.  The covered brown buttons are bound to come in useful some day.

The second was a Ralph Lauren Polo man's sweater in navy cashmere - the colour in the photograph is too light.  This is nice yarn.  The seams were impossible to unpick, partly because of the dark colour, so I did more cutting than I would have liked.  The yarn is slightly thinner than 4 ply, and so nice.