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.
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:
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.
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.
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.
My guidelines for choosing yarn for blanket #147 were simple - medium colours and no reds. This blanket is knitted in double knitting weight and I enjoy knitting with smaller needles. For want of red it became blue and green as well as my favourite neutral beige grey brown shades.
I added some yarns that I had rejected for the previous blanket #146 as too dark.
And some bright blue and greens. I keep saying that I don't like these because it is so difficult to avoid them spoiling the look. From now on I would like to reserve them for the dark blankets, if I can only remember.
For softness I added these. The grey on the left is from a charity shop. I bought some five balls without labels. I like to think that they are mohair. There may be some acrylic content, but they smell animal. The next is the angora yarn from blanket #138, and the blue is a Pingoiun yarn, d'Esprit Angora. It feels like angora, but the label buried deep inside says that it is only 10% angora, the rest acrylic and nylon.
The two garments that I unpicked were also soft.
The first is a Peruvian Connection picture sweater. This was lovely, and such a work that has gone into knitting it. It was so difficult to unravel, though. The ends, and there were thousands of ends, had not been woven in, but sewn in, into themselves two or three times. I wondered why I wanted to unpick it. The only way to cope was to forget about time, and take it slowly getting into the rhythm of unpicking. The yarn is alpaca, 4 ply, knitted double, and the sweater yielded lots of nice wool in lovely colours, all in different lengths, some even very long. I am pleased with the yarn. It will last a long time.
The second is an M&S cashmere cardigan, tied with a silk sash. The colour is a nice light brown and the yarn very soft. I have included in on every row, and I like the sheen the colour adds as well as the softness. I am pleased that there will be enough to do the whole blanket.
I succumbed to the temptation of Noro Blossom when it was remaindered in the July sales nearly two years ago. I remembered liking the picture of the Acton cushion in Jane Ellison's booklet Simply Noro. It was the garter stitch stripes that appealed to me. Judging by the measurements in the Acton pattern I worked out that 1 kg would be enough for a blanket. That was expensive enough, as the yarn was just reduced by a third, not half. But it nagged at me that it wasn't enough yarn, and when I did some more calculations I realised I would need another bag of 500 gr. Luckily I could still get one of the same shade and dye lot.
After all of that, and quite disgusted with myself for spending so much money, I put the yarn away safely because I was no longer minded to start knitting with it. Now, with the Geo Modern Throw finished I got the yarn out again.
I was surprised. This must be the first time that I have bought a Noro yarn without any turquoise or bright green. The pink I like because it is nice with the lavender and blue shades. I don't even mind the apricot coloured red.
I had in mind to knit a log cabin pattern. For this purpose I bought another two hanks of Noro Blossom last autumn; this time in a bright pink shade. I didn't like the block. It seemed to me that the yarn was too busy for the pattern, with the colour changes and the boucle. I tried another way of garter stitch blocks knitted together, but I didn't like that either. But, this method I will bear in mind for some future project. So it was back to plain garter stitch stripes. That's what attracted me to the yarn in the first place, but it does seem simple.
I use my method of one row stripes by three yarns, to avoid abrupt colour changes with a new hank. I decided not to match shades at all. So I cut the first hank when I had knitted approximately one third and the second after two thirds. This way I avoid joining new hanks for all three at the same time. The only decision on shades is which end to start knitting from with a new hank. Sometimes I avoid a shade, other times I look for one.
As a result the shades are all over the place. In some places there are distinct stripes, in others the shades merge nicely. In other words, precisely like my standards blankets. I have no idea at all how the shades are arranged, if they are symmetrical or not. I suspect the runs are unequal lengths.
I'm surprised that I don't enjoy the knitting very much. I can't get on with the boucle, the needles are too thick and the yarn slippery, nice and soft but still slippery. I am impatient to get ahead with it so that I can continue with the next non-standard blanket, and I force myself to keep knitting. I would be happy knitting two or three rows per day, but that way it would take months to finish. I do like the end result though. It is going to be a blanket that I like very much, both the colours and the texture.
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:
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.)
I added some yarns that I had rejected for the previous blanket #146 as too dark.
And some bright blue and greens. I keep saying that I don't like these because it is so difficult to avoid them spoiling the look. From now on I would like to reserve them for the dark blankets, if I can only remember.
For softness I added these. The grey on the left is from a charity shop. I bought some five balls without labels. I like to think that they are mohair. There may be some acrylic content, but they smell animal. The next is the angora yarn from blanket #138, and the blue is a Pingoiun yarn, d'Esprit Angora. It feels like angora, but the label buried deep inside says that it is only 10% angora, the rest acrylic and nylon.
The first is a Peruvian Connection picture sweater. This was lovely, and such a work that has gone into knitting it. It was so difficult to unravel, though. The ends, and there were thousands of ends, had not been woven in, but sewn in, into themselves two or three times. I wondered why I wanted to unpick it. The only way to cope was to forget about time, and take it slowly getting into the rhythm of unpicking. The yarn is alpaca, 4 ply, knitted double, and the sweater yielded lots of nice wool in lovely colours, all in different lengths, some even very long. I am pleased with the yarn. It will last a long time.
The second is an M&S cashmere cardigan, tied with a silk sash. The colour is a nice light brown and the yarn very soft. I have included in on every row, and I like the sheen the colour adds as well as the softness. I am pleased that there will be enough to do the whole blanket.
