FO Friday: Shades of Purple Blanket with a bonus spectacular moustache (2015 FO# 12)

This FO Friday post is one day late! I have a (not very) good excuse - I took all the photos yesterday but then I had one glass of red wine while I was cooking dinner followed by another one while I was eating dinner and then I was completely cactus for the rest of the night. I ended up in bed by 8pm watching a delightful film noir (Somewhere in the Night (1948), starring John Hodiak, who wore one of the most fascinating moustaches I've ever seen)

What even is the purpose of a moustache that size? I could not take my eyes off it. Anyway, it was a really nice night and I feel relaxed and refreshed today. However, I did not get any writing done (#noregrets).



This blanket is one I finished a while ago. In August 2013 I started knitting this for a friend's baby. I liked knitting it and thought it looked nice but the edge seemed too unfinished for the blanket to be given away as a gift. I tried a few borders but none of them looked right so instead I blocked the blanket to see whether that would fix the edging issues.

It was promptly adopted by Lucy, and the rest is history (I bought a nice baby blanket from Target. It was the right thing to do).

Mine, all mine.

The pattern is an easy one: cast on three stitches and increase every row by knitting into the front and back of each stitch. Continue to knit until you have used up almost half of the yarn. Knit three rows without increasing, then decrease by knitting the second and third stitch of each row together until you have three stitches left. Cast off.

The yarn iss Patons Soft Haze, which is lovely (although almost impossible to rip, so try to avoid making any mistakes!). It has sadly been discontinued. I used six balls to make a decent-sized blanket.

I still think the blanket needs a border - maybe a knitted-on icord? I would definitely make one of these again but this time keep it hidden from my mischievous cat.

Hey, what's my blanket doing outside? (I suspect that Lucy and I might spend too much time together...)

2014 FO #1: Luxury OpArt blanket

My first finished object of the year is done!

My Luxury OpArt blanket is done with two weeks to spare before the baby is due. 

 It was pretty ruffled and out of shape when it came off the needles...

..so I blocked it really severely (with Lucy's help, of course). 

I liked knitting this blanket - the pattern's super easy to follow and I like tedious knitting. However, it's became clear as soon as I took out the blocking wires that this is not a blanket that wants to be square - unless it's blocked every time it's washed, it's going to end up bendy and ruffled again. I hope the new parents like unusual blankets and think of this as a design feature, or else I'm not sure the blankie will get much use.

However, have a look at the accessories I made with the leftover wool - cuteness in a teeny tiny package.

More on those tomorrow.

Social conventions are stupid

I find December a hard month to get through. Primarily, this is because I am quite introverted and December involves a level of socialisation that I find difficult to cope with. It’s like there’s this unwritten rule that it is absolutely vital to see every single person in you know Before Christmas, as if 25 December is some magical date that, if you haven’t renewed your friendship vows by, they will be declared null and void and your personal relationship will be irrevocably harmed. (As a side note, I feel exactly the same way about hen’s dos. After the wedding, the bride will still live in the same house with the same partner working in the same job as she did before the wedding. The only difference is that after the wedding they will have dropped the equivalent cost of a three-month trip in Europe on a really big party. Ironically, it’s childbirth that really changes the rules of friendships and with pregnancy there’s sadly not the chance for one big last messy night out.)

To be able deal with everything that is required of me in December, in the past I have approached it like a military exercise. I write a list of people I need to see and book them early with dates, places and times. I write a list of people I need to write cards for and have the cards written ready to be posted on 1 December. I write a list of people I need to buy presents for and have the presents ready and wrapped as soon as I can. I do everything in my power to make everything run as smoothly as possible. I am like a well-oiled well-run Christmas machine, making Christmas happen with a precision rarely seen outside a Swiss watch factory or the German railway system. There’s no room for flexibility but I get shit done. 

This leads me to the secondary reason I have trouble with December: it makes people go crazy. I start being involved in hour-long discussions of how to deal with the fact that Auntie Doris doesn’t like turkey but Uncle Mike thinks it’s not Christmas unless there’s a full turkey dinner. A reasonable answer would be to ask each person to bring a dish that they’re happy with eating (and, maybe if Uncle Mike realised what an effort it is to make a moist delicious turkey he wouldn’t be quite so fussy about wanting one every single year) but instead there’s drama that usually involves the person hosting cooking two or three different meals to appease each of the four people attending dinner. People spend too much money on presents and then get upset about the presents they do or don’t receive. They drink too much and have fights with their partner about who agreed to be the designated driver and who just can’t control themselves around an open bottle of sparkling wine. It’s exhausting.

Part of the Christmas preparation for me is the making of Christmas gifts. I’ve embarked on different projects over the years: knitting everyone in my family a pair of socks; knitting just some a pair of socks and, this year, knitting two pairs of socks. But I don’t know if it’s because of the unseasonally cold weather or just general end-of-year tiredness, this year I have less tolerance for the Christmas drama (I don’t care if there’s chicken instead of turkey. I don’t care if you order pizzas! It’s about the company, not the food. And, if you insist on cooking the whole meal yourself and not accepting any offers of help and not allowing anyone else to bring any food, I do not want to hear one single word about being a martyr to the family. Not one.).  In a first since I have started knitting as an adult, this year I have absolutely no desire to knit gifts for anyone else. So, instead of working on the socks I was planning to give away, I have worked on nothing other than this:

Isn't it gorgeous? It's an Op Art knitted in Luxury 8ply in Sunflower and Purple Storm. 

The pattern is super simple - one knitted row followed by one purl row, changing colours as required. Rinse and repeat until the blanket is the desired size or the wool has run out. Stress free, cheerful and soft to the touch, this is exactly the project the doctor ordered. With the aid of this blanket, I might just be able to make it through the month...

2013 FO #15: Serenity-ish blanket

After what feels like months plugging away on the six-stitch garter-stitch border, this week I was finally able to cast off and block my Serenity blanket. Yesterday was beautiful and sunny and the baby is being delivered in three days (by pre-booked cesearean) so I decided to gentle block it outside in the sun to make sure that the blanket was dry and delivered to the mother before the infant was. I like the idea of a baby being delivered in to the world with an item that was crafted solely for them.

Lucy, of course, thought I'd placed it there just for her. I hope this new bub is not sensitive to cat hair!

I think I should really call it a Serenity-ish blanket because I heavily modified the finishing of the blanket to fit in with my very particular ideas of what a blanket should look like (square, big and concluded).

The original pattern had the lace and cable inside finishing halfway through a 'leaf'. There is no way I could have an incomplete leaf on a blanket of mine, so I continued the pattern so that the unfinished leaves were closed. The already closed leaves were continued to the border with a seven-stitch cable, and the inner section was then finished off with two purl rows.

I then did 20 rows of bee stitch (10 of the two-row repeats) before knitting another two purl rows and finishing it all off with a six-stitch garter-stitch border.

This resulted in a blanket that is big enough for mum to use it as a lap blanket if she wants as well as being the perfect size to wrap a baby in.

I am very pleased with this blanket - I think it's gorgeous and perfect for a summer baby and was fun to knit - the knitted present trifecta.

Pattern: Charts A, B and C of the Serenity blanket, then modifications as outlined above.

Yarn: Almost two full balls of Bendigo Woollen Mills Cotton 8-ply in Daffodil

Notes: Fun! A great project.

Roadtripping: T minus 1

Last Tuesday, I left Melbourne on a roadtrip to Sydney. I was super excited because it is my first holiday of the year and I had reached that point where my mind was starting to go a bit melty. When you can't remember how to operate a cheese grater (hold, move cheese), then it's time to take a break!

As a knitter, one of the most important things to plan for any journey is which project and how many projects to take. I knew I'd be in a car for at least 20 hours so I wanted to take something relatively involved but without any loose needles. I knew the perfect project - a Serenity in the Bendy Cotton I bought a few weeks ago.

I  knew I had to get past the stage with DPNs (too much chance of dropping one while driving and being stuck without knitting until the next rest stop) so I cast on a week before I left to give me enough time to get to the circular needles. All was going smashingly until I started transferring the stitches to the circular and saw this:

A big hole where I'd messed up the increases. Because of the cabling that was in the middle of the lace, it was just too hard for me to fix and I almost cried as I unwound hours of work to get back to a mistake-free row.

So much smaller! But (luckily), still big enough to STREEETTTCCCHHHH around the circular needle and, shortly after this photo was taken, the blanket was packed up with its pattern, spare stitch markers and healthy travel-appropriate snacks and on its way to Sydney. 

Roadtrip!!

Yum yum in my tum tum

This is what I had for lunch today.

The hot dog is vegetarian and I added a blueberry smoothie to up the nutrition content and lower the overall GI of the meal but I can't deny that for lunch today I had highly processed (lean, though!) protein wrapped in highly processed carbs covered with highly processed sugar and salt-filled tomato sauce. Terrible! But sometimes a girl's gotta do what a girl's gotta do and today, I needed to eat some junk. 

It was delicious.

In other news

Two of my friends are pregnant at the moment, which means *drum roll* baby blankets! I had some Soft Haze that I'd stashed just for this purpose so I very excitedly cast last week.

The fabric is really lovely but I just don't think the colours are really right for either of the parents. I'll finish it but it might be going on the charity pile...

Only if Lucy approves, of course. Lucy is the boss of all decisions in this house :)

FO Friday: Radiating Star Blanket (2012 FO #8)

A few weeks ago I blogged about running out of wool to finish a baby blanket for a baby that's due this week. I bought wool in a complementary shade in a destash on Ravelry but in the end decided that having just part of the border in a different colour would look messy and unprofessional so I would hold out to find wool in the same shade. This meant I had to start another blanket immediately (babies don't wait for knitting projects to be finished, unfortunately!), so about two hours after posting about my dilemma I was in my LYS looking for wool to start a new blanket. As I entered, right next to the front door was a shelf full of - you guessed it - the discontinued Patons Soft Haze in the exact colourway I needed. Yay!

I gifted the blanket this morning and before I did I took some photos on my iPhone. I wish I had checked them before the blanket left my possession because they are just awful! Please excuse them and, when looking at them, visualise how soft, fluffy and gorgeous the blanket really is because you honestly get no sense of that from these pictures...

On my hallway floor...

The original pattern has you knit 95 rows of lace and then cast off. I liked the way the lace pattern looked but I felt that without a border the blanket looked a bit unfinished and would roll without the stabilising effect of garter stitch. So I stopped at Row 59, cast on 20 stitches and began a knitted-on garter stitch border.

With flash the lace pattern is clearer...

Of course I used absolutely no maths when deciding how wide to make the border so after I'd knit about 10cm I realised I was going to have to miter the corners. I figured since to change the direction of a border 90 degrees you did a short row every row, to change the direction of the border the 45 degrees I needed to to have the eight equal points required, I would do a short row every second row. So, knit 18 wrap and turn, knit 16 wrap and turn, knit 14 wrap and turn, et cetera.

Ugh - these photos are awful!

As you can see the border still ruffles a little bit, so I didn't get the rate of decrease completely perfect. Next time, instead of doing 3 decreases every 6 rows, I would do 2 decreases every five rows.

Even with the slight ruffled effect I think this blanket is gorgeous. It's super warm and cuddly and machine washable - all of the things a baby blanket needs to be. I hope the mum and the new bub like the blanket just as much as I do. I'm also super happy to finish my first Cast On Mania project in the required timeframe - GAAK, here I am.

Unfortunately, because I liked the yarn so much and it's been discontinued I bought 5 balls from my LYS and two from the Ravelry destash I mentioned above. That means that this stash busting project, which took 6.5 balls, actually increased my stash by 6.5 balls. Stashbusting - 0, successful cast-on mania baby knitting - 1. Oh well, I guess you can't win them all!

Cast On Mania Day 1: Radiating Star Blanket

I am pleased to announce that this blog's regular scheduling has been interrupted. Instead, I present you with:

Every day this week I will be starting a new project. Every project is to be made with yarn from the stash and all of them need to be finished in two months or less.  It'll be fun!  Clearly crazy, but mostly fun.

Today's project is the Radiating Star Blanket by Alexis Layton in Patons Soft Haze, a discontinued yarn that has been in my stash since May 2009 - three years! It's got a really soft and fluffy feel to it so I think it'll be perfect for this very pretty blanket.

The baby its for is due at the end of June so some speed is required. The wool is chunky and the pattern is simple, so hopefully I'll get it done with much time to spare.

In other news, I think I may be part sloth

There are some days where I just want to get everything I have to do with the external world done as fast as possible so I can get back into pyjamas. Today was one of those days, and now it's 1 o'clock in the afternoon and I'm sitting at my desk in my pyjamas, under a blanket with a hot water bottle. It's days like this that remind me how luck I am that I can work from home, sloth-style.

Back tomorrow with my Day 2 Cast On Mania project! 

No Blanket For You!

About two years ago, I started knitting a Moderne Baby Blanket (rav link), mainly because I had a huge pile of 5-ply crepe that I wanted to use up and I have a bit of a problem with delayed gratification - if I get into my mind that I will do a certain thing, I want to do it now.  After knitting three and a bit stripes, it was put away and forgotten about.

Then, when doing my WIP Round-up last year, I pulled it out of its storage place to take a photo of it.  This is how it looked when I last blogged about it:

Because it was out in the open again, I occasionally picked it up and worked a random row.  There was a baby due in February, and since this is a baby blanket I thought it was a match made in heaven.  Then there were complications with the pregnancy, so the due date was moved to the middle January, and I started working harder on the blanket.  This is what it looks like now.  I love knitting on this blanket!  It's nothing but row after row of mindless knitting.  Every now and then you need to cast off a few stitches and then pick some up, but not very often.  It's a wonderful project for knitting in front of the TV, and as a plus it looks ridiculously stylish and much harder than it actually is.  

The couple I was knitting the blanket for are Sam's second cousins.  They're really nice and we see them about six times a year, but only as a group and at family functions.  We never see them outside the family, and even though I like them immensely, I don't know them very well.  So I started thinking ... I love this blanket - will they?  Will they understand the hours of work that have gone into creating this modular masterpiece?  Will they appreciate the gift of my time and affection that it represents and take care of it accordingly?  In all honestly, these people may be the No.1 ticket holders in the fanclub of Handmade Stuff International.  They may appreciate my work, time and effort.  But I don't know them that well, and I am not prepared to gift 100 hours of my time to someone who may or may not appreciate what they are receiving.  

I really grappled with this decision, and I eventually found a solution.  They're getting a knitted hat instead - it's super cute (it has a pompom!), super quick, made from stash and I am not invested enough in the hat to care if they use and appreciate it or not (of course, I hope they do.  See how cute it is?).  Now, everyone's happy. Me especially.