Projects
A Blanket of Many Colors, 22 to Be Exact
Dear Kay,
I guess you could call this What I Did On My Holiday Vacation.
To recap: Back in December I had the New Shoes Feeling, when a new palette of MDK Jane yarn arrived and I went on a tear of square-making good times.
Kay, you’d be so proud of me, just letting go of reality until I looked up and another year had dawned, and it was time to get some clothes on for a change. Shattered skeins of Jane tangled at my feet, granola as entree, you know how this goes. I ran out of Belvitas is what I’m saying.
It was all squares all the time until I’d made a pile of garter stitch squares using all 22 colors of our Jane yarn.
Once I made 22, I made another 22, wanting to get enough squares to get a decent-sized throw going while simultaneously losing touch with reality.
I didn’t focus on how these squares would be laid out. I just focused on how pleasant it was to make a seven-inch square, how you can get such a groove going.
The Configuration
Eventually I did wonder how were they were going to behave with each other. Tin Can Knits’s Fly Away Blanket pattern is so malleable, so open to improv, that I nearly lost my mind trying out combinations of colors and placement of these triangles.
After flying geese, pinwheels, and orderly rows, I landed on diamonds. YES! This way, colors could really get up against each other and do mysterious things.
Here are 21 colors (by mistake I left out SAGE, and did two Clementines. Does anybody even care? I did! See how wound up I was?)
I liked this a lot. But having TWO of each color got me thinking that maybe the diamonds could each have two colors that were a bit more related, so that the full blanket would be colorful but slightly more coherent.
Some of the color pairings weren’t working (the dark blue and greens, see?), so I kept moving squares around until the diamonds rose up and said to me, Please stop. Haven’t you worried about this enough? We don’t care! Move on!
Layout Experiment No. 1: Light and Dark
Once I sewed forty garter mattress seams (the dependent clause of the week) (it wasn’t so bad) (Tin Can Knits has a superb how-to video), I experimented with putting the light values at one end, dark values at the other.
See?
As my grandmother would say, I didn’t care for that. It looked weird, unbalanced. (Note: a blanket using only the lightest value colors would be really great, but hey I also had 24 nonlight squares so forget THAT.)
Experiment No. 2: Alternating Light and Dark
Better. I guess. I mean, it’s a bunch of diamonds with a lot of colors in there.
So that’s where I landed. Diamonds, two colors in each.
The Ends of It All
In ends management news, I took the advice of the pattern and left 20″ strands at the end of each triangle for the eventual seaming extravaganza.
Note that I spit-felted (aka the felted join, the wet splice, whatever, it all sounds vaguely lewd) at the moment when I finished one triangle and began the second. This saved 44 ends which granted isn’t that big a deal in something like this, but it’s definitely a tidy thing to do. I would stop six stitches before the triangle ended, chop the yarn in use about 3 inches long, then spit-felt the new color. The join would land in the vicinity of the corner, and that was good enough for me.
I got so, so good at garter stitch mattress stitching. In the hypnotic mesmerization of all these seams, I really did hit a flow state. Get yourself a few dozen squares—you will attain higher consciousness, I promise.
More to Come, for Sure
I want to do a third column of five diamonds, to get this Fly Away to true blanket status. At the moment it’s a giant wrap, and it makes me unspeakably happy to bundle myself up in this thing. I’m taking it to Vogue Knitting Live, because what better place to wear a blanket around and declare it a garment?
For the record, a skein of Jane makes four seven-inch triangles. So at this point I’ve got a half skein left of each color. I used 10 skeins of Yorkshire, the undyed taupey gray color.
I could obviously go on endlessly about this thing, so fair warning—the year has just begun and I type fast.
Love,
Ann
PS Going to Vogue Knitting Live? We are—come join us! We’ll be at an Irish pub called Connolly’s (Times Square location just one block from the Marriott!) from 4-6 p.m. on Friday, January 30. What could be cozier than that? Let us know you’ll be there—reply here.
Wow! Lovely! And I remember a Kaffe interpretation you wore as a garment once day long ago! Knitting is wonderful!
What an adventure! This is an heirloom! I was worried about the sewing up from the beginning. But you didn’t seem (seam?) to mind. Love the diamonds! (Was intending to go to Vogue Live but, sadly, life had other plans. Hopefully next year!).
Ann, you must be the fastest (not to mention the most persistent) knitter I know (okay, maybe tied with Dana). If you have a mountain of sweaters, surely you must have a whole mountain range of blankets! I love the process you went through to arrange the colors, thanks very much for that. And I admit that a whole blanket of the paler colors tempts me. You and Kay and all of MDK are so deeply appreciated!
Hmph. So that’s where all the Yorkshire went.
….and the blanket is glorious!
Another knitting square mimicking a quilt block! I love it! Half square triangles! I am still working on log cabin knitting and it is so fun!!! It would be great to put a knitted blanket next to its mate done in quilting
Ann, it’s magnificent. All those yarn-square do-si-dos were totally worth it.
Ann, It is stunning!
Amazing- so many pretty colors! I love the two color diamonds that you decided on- can’t wait to see the finished product!
I love your blanket/wrap and this post brought up a lot of happy memories of knitting blankets, knitting squares, just Knitting All The Time. Thank you for that!
Only MDK can make me even THINK of a project like this! But many UFO’s bring me back to reality! I did manage to finish a Kiki Moriko rug and a Kaffe Fawcett circles scarf. Maybe……..
Beautiful seams
After just watching your master class on Knit Stars this makes perfect sense.
What a glorious treasure.
Ann, this is AMAZING! And SO INSPIRING!!! Beautiful!
Ann, I love your approach to this blanket – just make the squares and the rest will come. What a beautiful blanket/wrap – wear it with pride! Meanwhile, thank you for another project to add to my list. I will of course distract myself from current projects to do a bit of planning. Wheee!