Mitered Square Blanket Finished

Yesterday morning I finished the last stitches of the I-cord border of my mitered square blanket and took the blanket with us to photoshoot it on the meadows near Zlatnite mostove. The blanket is big - 190 cm long and 120 cm wide and taking a decent picture of it does require space :) According to my Ravelry notes, I started the blanket on January 6th last year, so it took me almost a year and a half to finish it, or rather to stop knitting it, as I had been considering it finished for the last month and then continued adding rows and columns of squares to it to enlarge it in length and width. And I could have continued doing so happily, but I ran out of yarn and I didn't want to spend any more money on this project. As Leonardo da Vinci put it - art is never finished, only abandoned (me being cheeky :)))

Although I didn't work on the blanket for long periods of time, it was always there as an easy project to revert to when I was feeling down on a current project or in between projects and I honestly feel somewhat sad and empty-handed having finished it. And for the first time in ages I don't have a WIP, not even an abandoned one - I'll have to think of something quickly, as I seem to have forgotten how to function without my knitting :)

The blanket weighs about 1250 g and is 24 x 15 squares, 35 stitches each. The yarn is YarnArt Jeans, 50% cotton 50% acrylic, about 90% of which is hand dyed. When I started the blanket I had just found cotton dyeing and I wanted to play with a few balls of this cotton acrylic blend I had in my stash. However, while knitting the blanket in winter I found that it was not very warm, not even close to wool warm. In terms of practicality it would be definitely wiser to choose wool, maybe some wool/nylon sock yarn. However, in terms of pleasure to knit and dye I would always choose this soft and easy to care for cotton/acrylic blend.

Pattern: Mitered square blanket
Yarn: YarnArt Jeans, 1250 g, hand dyed
Needle: 3 mm
Time to knit: 1 year 5 months

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.

My Works In Progress Mid 2018

My current works in progress.

First - the Wisteria Sweater, which I have decided to frog and start anew a bit differently. The problem is that the yarn is very very light and I don't like the fit. There is no flow and drape, the sweater just stays like a puffy cloud around my body, and as I did not make it with negative ease, it actually looks unflattering and the end curls up, despite the garter stitch edge. As I'm totally in love with the yarn and the color, I don't want to waste it on a piece I'm not going to love. So far I'm considering two possibilities - a loose cardigan to put on a colder summer night or a very fitting sweater, like Kim Hargreaves' Temperate. But that will wait, so far I'm just freezing it.

The thing I'm working on actively this week is my mitered square blanket. It is progressing nicely, I've dyed the yarn for the next row of squares. I plan to make it as wide as it is now - 13 squares and to grow it in length until I get tired of it. I'm still not sure what I want it for - a lap blanket - then a row or two more would be sufficient, a cover for the balcony sofa - I'll need about 4 more rows for that, or an actual full size blanket - I'll need at least to triple its length for this purpose.

My third knit is a cowl I started back in the winter, using my Biker Chick imitation yarn. I had finished the cowl and actually worn it once, only to find that the yarn was too scratchy to be worn around the neck. In January I had about 80 g left from the super soft black merino from the Bonus sweater, so I started adding a second layer to the cowl. I'm not hurrying it, as winter is NOT coming any time soon :)

Me wearing the one-layer cowl on peak Tumba in December:

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:

New Cushion

I made a new mitered square cushion. I'm not happy with the Sabrina Cardigan I started back in May, so I thought of some small project that would keep my taste for knitting while figuring out what to do with the bigger project. I have lots of YarnArt Jeans scrap yarn and I also had a piece of the upholstery fabric for the back of the cushions, so I made a new one.

I don't think I planned the color distribution that well this time - who knew that the pink-chartreuse combination would look very much like the lilac-bright yellow combination, and placing them next to each other would turn a mistake:

I tried to plan the combinations for each row in advance, but often changed my mind in the course of knitting. My guidelines were - never place the same color in neighboring squares, try to combine light with dark colors and to distribute colors evenly throughout.

So this is how it turned in the end. I added a double border in off-white, as with the previous two cushions.

We've been using the old cushions every day for two years now and the colors have faded a little, but otherwise they are still very soft and comfy and very easy to maintain:

Singles

I've finished a few firsts.

The first cushion - yes, it's been decided the entrelac mitered square thing is going to be a pair of decorative (picnic?) cushions. Working on this project was fun and a study on color combinations. Apart from the obvious good pairs (red and yellow, pink and lilac, orange and canary), there were some surprising hits like orange and furn green or lilac and dark greenish grey. And a few obvious bad combinations, like pink and green, or lilac and fern green. It was also interesting to see how the colors chameleonized when paired. All in all, the observations might be useful for future reference when I'm knitting combo sweaters. I'm very pleased with how this project is turning out.

I'll have to plan a visit to COMO or IKEA these days to buy two decorative cushions 40x 40 cm, to come up with a suitable color for the border I-cord and to make the second cushion (not in my immediate plans actually).

The second single is a leg warmer. Cast this on three times, you know - the third time's the charm, the usual developments here - the first one was too wide, the second too tight, I think I got the third one right. I wonder if the other knitting folks out there unravel as much as I do or is it only me and my obsession with getting the things as perfect as possible? Am I to worry? Just kidding, there's nothing wrong with me (right?).

I know the cable is almost invisible on the black background, but still ... a k2p2 rib would have been too boring :) I've already cast on the second leg warmer, these will most probably be my next FO.

The third single is a glove and my inability to make a decision over this glove might actually be worrisome ... or ridiculous. Being a Libra is such a nuisance (eyes rolling :). As I mentioned before, I added fingers to a fingerless gloves pattern, which would have probably worked well (it did for three other people on Ravelry, who did the same), if the yarn was suitable for gloves. But it turns out thick coarse yarn produces rather rustic unflattering gloves.

So I keep on staring at these and still can't decide - shall I knit the second one or unravel the first and make something different, another pair of leg warmers or men's gloves? Hm, looking at the pictures, probably it isn't as bad as I thought and it's certainly very warm. OK, I think I'll make the second glove and be over with it :) Crazy, right?

For other  people's WIPs - visit TAMI