Wednesday, June 18, 2008

Congratulations Steve and Jenna

Friends of ours that live in Vancouver had a baby boy on May 27th. His name is Liam, he is very cute, but I'm not going to post his picture because he's not my kid. Sorry, you'll just have to take my word for it. Very. Cute.

Way back in February, I started a blanket for him. I went like crazy for awhile, then I kind of languished a little. Then I realized it was May, and the baby was due in May so I started knitting a little quicker, albeit, not quick enough.

4 of 12

I chose the Modern Baby Blanket from Mason Dixon Knitting, it was cute, looked like fun, and was something I had never done before. I knit an Intarsia baby blanket for my nephew in 2002, and I never want to sew together that many squares every again, this blanket, no seaming. None. I had a really hard time choosing yarn, I wanted to use the Rowan Calmer, really wanted to, but I need 12 balls and at $13/ball it just wasn't going to happen. I spent a really long time at the LYS looking at different DK-ish yarns, the washing instructions and the colours. I had already decided on the colour look I wanted and it needed to be easy to take care of, and not stretch out of shape since it was going to be fairly large. I settled on Sirdar Snuggly, acrylic, I known, but it feels nice, washes well and the colours were right. Well, as right as they could have been, the Calmer colours were RIGHT.

7 of 12

Finished

And it was fun, the squares (and I use that term loosely, they're acutally rectangles) started off being small and quick. Then they got bigger and took longer and longer. I'm pretty sure the second to last set (2 side by side knit at the same time) took forever. Then, it was finished and I thought I would maybe do an applied I-cord border, so, I consulted the project pages on Ravelry and I like the look of it so off I went to learn how to do it. Then to decide what colour. I laid the blanket out on the floor and consulted the boys. "Navy Blue or Brown" I asked them (7.5 and 4.5 by the way). The small one didn't have much of an opinion, but the big one said "Well, there is a lot of dark blue around the edge and not as much brown so I think it would show up better and look nicer if it were brown". I couldn't argue with that logic, Jer had been thinking blue, but had his mind changed by C.

Applied I-cord

I applied I-cord for an hour on Sunday night and didn't even make my way across one of the short sides of the blanket, very discouraging. But then Monday night I was an I-cord machine just zooming around churning it out. I had to make myself go to bed because the end was in sight and I could have stayed up to finish, but it would not have been smart. So I finished it last night. It looks so good. Other than my too-tight cast off across one of the ends that alters the square-ness of the whole thing, I'm pretty happy with it. I hope they are too.

The whole shebang

Moderne Baby Blanket from Mason-Dixon Knitting
For Liam McKinley H.
4.5mm circular needle
Sidar Snuggly DK, Ivory, light blue, navy blue, brown

2 comments:

zenren said...

Ive got a couple of log cabins on the needles. They can get daunting once they get larger. I like the look of them though. Your icord edge looks great.

Anonymous said...

That is really cool! Love the outdoor pics.