Showing posts with label afghan. Show all posts
Showing posts with label afghan. Show all posts

Monday, September 10, 2018

Mitered Square Blanket: Progress Update


I had abandoned my Mitered Square Afghan for a while, but I've been back to it and knitting it with full speed. I passed through the point where it was big enough for a cover for our balcony sofa, but I decided I wanted it a full size blanket. I'm enjoying it so much! However, because I started it out of cotton/acrylic blend, it is not as warm and cozy as a wool blanket and I'm seriously considering a second one next year, out of wool/acrylic blend. Dyeing all the tiny skeins of yarn and then turning them into colored squares is simply too much fun :)

: A few progress pictures




: And this is how I join the squares. Instead of picking up stitches with the new yarn, I go with a small sharp needle (I believe it's a US00  - 1.75 mm needle) through the bumps of the garter stitches of the square to the right of the new square - this makes 17 new stitches

and then I continue going through the square to the bottom of the new one and further create 17 more stitches + 1 in the middle, a total of 35 stitches.

Then I fix the new thread and directly start knitting the new square with my 3 mm needles.

The last two squares of this row are done. I've decided the width of the blanket to be 13 squares, which is about 1 m wide now, before washing, but given how garter stitch stretches, I expect it to grow to at least 1.20 m wide.

As for the length, I've knitted 14 rows of squares so far (you can see on this last picture I've added a whole row of squares to the blanket) and I intend to make them probably 23 or 24 rows. I'll have to go downtown today and buy at least  400 g more of white YarnArt Jeans to continue my blanket. The final product will be about 1 kg in weight.


Monday, January 29, 2018

WIP: Mitered Square Afghan


Just a few photos of my mitered square afghan. As I mentioned in this post about cotton dyes, I have a lot of cotton-acrylic balls of yarn, remaining from other projects and I intend to make them into an afghan / cover for the settee on the balcony. The yarn is YarnArt Jeans and it is a very nice soft Turkish blend of cotton with premium acrylic, very popular for baby blankets in Bulgaria.


But the best thing about the blanket is that I got to experiment with all kinds of methods for applying dyes. Of all of the above 18 squares only three were made with the original yarn, all others were dyed with cotton dyes, some with full immersion, some with dip dyeing for a gradient, some with a resist twist, some were speckled and cooked in the microwave and the latest batch  (the first four from right to left) was powder speckled with low immersion on the stove. I've placed the original ball of yarn above each miniskein to show from where I've started creating the color. The first and the last miniskeins were made out of the light yellow color and these are the last yards of this ball.


And these two squares in the middle are probably my most favourite so far, I think I want to try to speckle sock yarn in similar colorways: