The next blanket

The next blanket, #205, is blue with some pink and the usual grey and beige.  I like these colours.  I added some thicker yarns and an odd rough blue mohair that gave the blanket a lot of texture.

I unravelled this cabled poloneck sweater in a lilac tweed yarn.  The yarn is nice, and the sweater shows no signs of having been worn.  It is my size, and I have tried it on.  I couldn't wear it because the wide sleeves make it uncomfortable.  It was easy to unravel.

Then I added this Lopi Gefjun Tweed yarn.  A pleasure to knit with.

The next blanket

The next blanket, #204, is another with white.  I like the yarns in this one, some nice blues and greens among the white, grey and beige.  There is thin green mohair yarn to give softness, but you can't see it.





For this blanket I unravelled this Spirit of the Andes alpaca tunic.  The yarn is nice, thin, soft, presumably undyed.  The body and sleeves are knitted in the round, with the raglan sleeves sewn in.  Unravelling the patterned cable stitch is more interesting than plain stocking stitch.

Without thinking I put the yarn in the washing machine on a normal wash, and this is how it came out.  It was not very difficult to get hold of an end and pull it away for winding into a ball.  And since it was alpaca it didn't break easily.  It made the yarn nicely fluffy.  This was just the first two hanks.  I will wash the rest in a more considerate way.

The next blanket

The next blanket, #203, is another dark one, in black, navy, brown, grey.  After my decision to stop buying yarn I decided to use yarn store yarns for my standard blankets.  There is no need to hoard them anymore; now the objective is to use everything.

I go through my spreadsheet chronologically, and add multiples of balls of yarn to the blankets.  I have another pile of odd balls to supplement, and now I include aran weight and anything that doesn't seem too thick.  This time I added hanks of Rowan aran Magpie, in this case dark navy, 25 gr hanks of Rowan DK and black Rowan 4 ply botany wool.  These have all been in the yarn store for many years, and it feels good to see them disappear.

The garment I unravelled is a navy cotton Cos cardigan.  It is huge and heavy, nearly 1 kg in weight.  It is my size but far too large and heavy to wear.  It looks reasonable in the picture.  I like the yarn, a smooth cotton that is easy to knit.

Afghan in a minute C40

The yarn was the reason for this blanket C40, a second version of Afghan in a minute from The best from Annie's Attic.  This was my first version.  It followed my decision to knit all my yarns as blankets and in simple patterns.  In fact, since it was aran weight the yarn should have gone into my standard blankets, but it was good quality, and I had wondered about what to do with it for years, so this is what it became.

The yarn was Jaeger Matchmaker Merino Aran, pure wool.  I had 10 balls in dark grey, shade Granite, and 7 balls in Light natural.  With this I looked for a brighter yarn, and found Cascade 220 Superwash in three shades of pink/lavender.  For more interest in knitting I added Regia Handdye Effect sock yarn.

I did my usual one row three yarn stripe.  I had planned to do a kind of gradient effect pattern by using up all of one ball of the pink before starting the next and the same with the sock yarn.  It didn't work, because I realised too late that somebody had written 85 gr on one of the Regia balls, which meant that I switched both pink and sock yarn at the same time with a sharp contrast.  Right in the middle of the blanket.  I realised too late what had happened.

I enjoyed the knitting with nice yarns.  Very easy.  I didn't do a border this time, because I liked the look of the tension square without borders.  Because of the sock yarn, there was enough yarn for a full length single blanket.  I cast off when I had run out of yarn.  The blanket is warm and cosy, as long as you don't look at it too long.

I didn't like the Regia yarn much.  The colours are fine, but it consists of wool surrounded by a thin nylon, I think, thread.  It is a nuisance, because it splits easily, and once the nylon has separated it get entangled with other yarn.  I don't know what it would be like on its own. 

Afghan in a minute, The best from Annie's Attic C40

Yarns: Jaeger Matchmaker Merino Aran, 100 % wool, Granite and Light Natural

            Cascade 220 Superwash Shades 834, 837, 807

            Regia Handdye Effect sock yarn Shades 06553, 06557, 06550

Needles: 5.5 mm
Size: 120 cm by 170 cm, 1560 gr
Knitted 23 December 2018 to 16 March 2019

The next blanket

The next blanket, #202, lacks photos.  Somehow I managed to give it away without taking pictures.  It looks very similar to #198, as it uses a lot of the same yarns, in the same red blue green shades.

I used to unravel two or three garments for each blanket, but at some stage I started using odd balls that I bought for the blankets, and they became so many that I reduced the unravelling to one per blanket, and then to one per every three blankets.  Now that I have stopped buying yarn there will be no additional odd balls, and there are not many - in comparison - left, so now I will unravel one garment per blanket.

For this blanket I unravelled a fair isle waistcoat in dark green background.  Somebody has been having fun with this, using scrap yarn to try out different fair isle patterns.  I recognize the Kaffe Fassett poppies.  I like the bits of odd yarn that something like this produces.

The next blanket

The next blanket, #201, contains more red, along with pink, beige and some green and blue.  There is also nice yellow and orange.

The nice red wool came from a bag of odd yarn.  I like bags where you can't see the content clearly because of the fun of opening it up and seeing what you've bought.  In this bag I could see some nice dyed sock yarn, and there was more good quality Lang sock yarn, very nice knitting despite the bright shades.  The red yarn was knitted into some odd shapes, intended as a bag I think.  It was knitted doubled, in a very tight tension in an aran pattern, painfully tight.  Intended as a substitute for felting?  I unravelled it and was surprised to find it completely straightened after washing, so it must be pure wool.  Here I included it as a regular red stripe, and there is more for another blanket.

The next blanket

This is the blanket, #200, where I learnt to appreciate white.  I have complained about the colour before.  In the process of rearranging my yarn I brought all the whites together, and gasped at the amount.  I decided to do a blanket in white only, with one strand of lavender sock wool.  After about 25 cm I decided the knitting was too boring, and I didn't like the result much either, so contrary to my principles of not unpicking blankets, I did, and reknitted it as a standard blanket, #200.  This was much more satisfying.  I did two regular white stripes, but here they are barely obvious.

The number #200 is not significant.  The numbering came about when I started entering the blankets in a spreadsheet in 1995.  Rows 1 and 2 were headings, so the first blanket was #3.  But before then I knitted some 20 blankets that were entered manually in a notebook, and it should still be around, somewhere.