The next blanket - #150

Blanket #150 turned out to be red and yellow, mixed with beige, brown and rust.  I like the little bit of green added.  There is still quite a lot of these bright colours in the yarn store, however much I try to get rid of them.  At least I like red.  Some of the yellow is too light for this blanket, but then it seemed too dark for blanket #149, and I have to include it somewhere.  It is dispiriting, too, that there are so many yarns that don't really blend but need to be used up.

#150 is such an even number, but it does not really mean anything.  The numbers go by the rows in the spreadsheet that I started in 1994.  I must have knitted some 20 blankets before then.  Occasionally I ask myself why do I do these - are they really any use.  Now I could afford to buy new wool, so there is no need to confine myself to the knitted garments in the yarn store.  But I still enjoy the unravelling, and using purely new wool would give a different character to the blankets.  I like the economical and ecological benefits of using unravelled wool.  The plain answer is that I knit these blankets because knitting them gives me so much joy.

For this blanket I unravelled a Bolivian knit cotton sweater from a charity shop.  It is knitted in a combination of fair isle and intarsia, quite well except for the part where the third shade has been swiss darned.  It was so difficult to unravel.  The yarn is a nice smooth mercerized cotton and I thought it was 4 ply weight doubled.  It turns out to be a thinner yarn trebled.  I don't mind dividing two strands but three is too much and the individual strands are too thin to use as 4 ply.  I went for removing the third strand and this gives a yarn of suitable weight.  The colours are lovely pink and blue pastel shades.

The second knit was a shawl knit in a brown shetland yarn.  It was very nicely knitted, but the yarn, a thick 4 ply, was too thick to produce a nice shawl.  This is probably why it ended up in a charity shop.  I bought it because I like the brown shade - very useful and will blend well.

I bought this Drops Vivaldi yarn in the flea market behind Frederiksberg city hall on my spring break.  There was about 200 gr, some of it knitted into the back or front of a sweater.  It was easily unravelled.  The colour is a nice lime green.  It is very thin, reminiscent of Rowan Kidsilk Haze, but it is only 58% mohair, the rest wool and polyamide.  It adds a lovely sheen to the blanket, and you can only just about see the colour.  In the biting wind in the outdoor market I did not notice the smell, but as soon as I got inside it was evident that it reeked of tobacco smoke.  The smell disappreared after washing.

The Noro Blossom blanket done

At last I finished the Noro Blossom blanket.  When I got to about 165 cm it seemed long enough, but there was still plenty of yarn left.  It didn't seem wide enough so I picked up stitches and knitted another 5 cm on each side.  At the top and bottom I added just a few rows.  I had planned to finish it off with an I-cord, but the beauty of the cord got lost in the unevenness of the yarn, so I did a double crochet cast off with the brighter shade instead.  I am pleased by the contrast which is not too bright.

The blanket is lovely.  It is warm and light and I love looking at it and wrapping it around myself.  It seems slightly lopsided with the top/bottom and side borders of unequal widths, but it is intended to be used, not to be looked at.

The needles I used, 5 mm, produced a loose knit, and I would have preferred the end product to be tighter, but the boucle yarn would have made it too uncomfortable to knit.  In the end I used less yarn than anticipated, possibly because of the loose knit.  I regret that I didn't take the opportunity to do a more challenging pattern than garter stitch or one that used the random striping to greater effect.  That is for future projects.  I must remember that I don't like knitting boucle yarns and I don't like knitting with thick needles.

Noro Blossom blanket C13

Yarn: Noro Blossom wool 40%, kid mohair 30%, silk 20%, nylon 10%; 1 250 g
Needles: 5 mm
Tension: 12 st
Size: 173 cm by 140 cm
Pattern: own
Knitted:   12 February to 14 July 2012

And blanket #149 again

I forgot to mention the very obvious fact that in blanket #149 every third row is bright pink.  This is shetland wool from a cone that I could not resist buying recently despite my reservations about bright colours.  The cone weighed exactly 500 grams, including the weight of the cone.  The label inside says Uppingham Yarns shetland wool.  The yarn is quite thin for 4 ply weight and not at all soft.  It is fine for the blankets, but too thin if you put it with another thin 4 ply, for example from the Sheila Duggie sweater.  I weighed it again after I finished the blanket.  Exactly 150 gr had been used, and that is useful information.  If I want to use the same 4 ply yarn every third row I will need at least 150 gr but probably less than 200 gr.

Another old nice favourite that went into the blanket is this Jaeger Wool Silk in a 20 gr ball.

And here is my Cabbage Patch doll dressed in the baby jacket.  This is the very first one that I bought, and I think the oldest.  She is smaller than more recent ones.  I love her dread locks and the way you can style them with your fingers.  She is sitting on my Kaffe Fassett star cushion next to some unravelled Noro Kureyon.  She no longer needs the jacket since I found some well fitting doll's clothes for her in a charity shop.  Regrettably she is not available for a photo session in her new outfit right now.  The idea was that I should knit or crochet or sew clothes for my dolls, but all my yarn is too precious for dolls.  I am considering buying some especially.

With some more pictures

Blogger is playing with me, or I don't understand it, so I will add two pictures here that should have gone in the previous post:

The next blanket

My knitting got derailed when I went away on a short holiday in May.  I stopped working on the Noro Blossom blanket - because it was nearing completion and I had to work out what to do next.  I took my bus knitting with me, a sock yarn sweater that I have not written about, and I have not touched it either since I came back.

I have been knitting on the standard blankets the whole time.  I finished blanket #148 and started #149.  In a way it is comforting to do just knitting that you don't have to think about, but now I do want to use my brain as well, and I have gone back to the Noro Blossom blanket.

But I will write about blanket #149.  This is in pale pastel colours, in double knitting weight, the kind of blanket that I knit time and time again and that is pleasurable each time.  There is nothing much to say about it.  (The holes that you can see in the picture will disappear when the ends are fastened.)

The first charity shop that I unravelled is a recent purchase.  I wanted a pale woollen 4 ply yarn, and this seemed to fit the bill.  It appears to be machine knitted with a label saying Sheila Duggie.  The off white yarn is a bit too thin, slightly unevenly spun with a fleck of the same colour.  I think it is wool, it behaves and it feels like wool.  I like the flower decoration and the stitch around the shoulders.  I could not work out how it was put together.  The neckband and the ribbing around the bottom and the wrists had been knitted together, but I could not find an end to start unravelling, so I had to resort to cutting.  Otherwise it was no trouble at all.

The second garment was a baby cardigan knitted in a very nice pale blue yarn, probably a wool blend.  I bought it for one of my Cabbage Patch dolls which came without clothes.  Although loosely knitted this was not so easy to unravel either because the ends had been very thoroughly fastened.

And this is one of the vintage yarns used - Patons Fuzzy Wuzzy - an angora wool blend probably from the 1970s.

Tapestry cushion finished: Primavera's sunflowers by Joanna Allen

This is the next tapestry cushion that I finished a while ago.  As with all my tapestry kits I bought it in a charity shop, this one some seven years ago.  It is by Primavera, and the designer is Joanna Allen.  You can still buy the kit, from John Lewis among other places.  It was not one of my favourites, but I still enjoyed stitching it, and I am very pleased by the way it turned out.  Somebody else helped stitch the flower bottom right, and it shows that it has been done in a different style.

The background wool for this kit was a dark red, and I was doubtful about how it would turn out.  The ones in John Lewis had a cream background, and I could not find a red one on the Internet either, although there was one in navy.  I thought cream would be too light and impractical, so I looked for a different colour.  In the end I chose a medium grey, and I like it.

The next blanket

It has been so long since my last entry that I have finished knitting blanket #148 and I have started crocheting the edging.  It is the next dark blanket, very similar to blanket #142, because a lot of the yarns are the same, but it is brighter with more and brighter reds and some bright blues.  This one is knitted in aran weight too.  I used the dark grey angora in this one too, and some random coloured navy mohair, and it makes it so soft.  (The colours in the pictures are too light.)

The next Kaffe Fassett jumper in turn to be unravelled was the Lattice patten from Glorious Knitting.  It is knitted exactly as in the book.  The problem with this kind of regular pattern is that all the yarns are the same lengths and there are a limited number of them.  The yarns are nice anyway, Rowan Spun Tweed and Fine Tweed and some fine chenille.  I like chenille yarns, but the thicker ones are inflexible to knit with.

The second garment was a Per Una zip front cardigan from the time when they did 100% wool clothes.  I bought this several years ago aiming it for a bus knitted blanket, but then I had second thoughts.  I thought it was shetland yarn but it is not.  The yarn came out quite well anyway, after washing.  The fronts were cut so I discarded them.  I have so much yarn now that I no longer have patience to deal with a lot of short ends in indifferent yarns.  I threw away the thick yarn in the collar and cuffs, too.  I could have split it, but I did not have a mind to.