*The blanket is possible with 11 balls, including the join, but if you want to have a little extra wiggle room for personal tension or longer tails for your join, I’d suggest buying 12 to be sure you have enough.
A little while ago I discussed WIP-itis and a blanket I’ve been working on since pretty much before the wheel was invented. Since then I’ve been busy trying to get it finished and thought I’d give a bit more info, since I was super vague in my last post.
This design has been going on for such a long time, I actually had to go back to April 2018 in my camera uploads to start digging out WIP photos, because it’s been put away so many times. Man, I take a lot of photos, of everything, every day. It took me forever to find WIP pics! Lesson of the day: file photos away by design when I take them. Hey, future Tammy, you’re welcome!
As I mentioned in my previous post, the blanket is made up of very easy squares. This type of square is called a mitered square and they are very popular among blanket knitters. I chose this specific stripe design for a reason, which you will see later when I discuss the final layout and what type of look I was going for. The square is made up of only about three different stitches, all of which you’ll have used already if you’ve made my patterns like the Hopscotch Scarf or Glacia Shawl. So don’t worry, this is another beginner friendly pattern which you can make with ease.
While this is a very easy square to make, designing it was a bit of a challenge, due to the limited amount of yarn included in the mini balls of the Stone Washed / River Washed Colour Pack. It was a bit of a balancing act with now to work the stripes to make the most of the minis. The length and weight of any yarn ball will vary to some degree, but when dealing with 10g balls, a small variation can make a big difference. This is especially true when you factor how our environment, mood and energy levels can affect our personal tension. When designing with these minis, you are basically designing to the smallest ball in the pack, which can be difficult because weight can also be affect by the dye used for the colours, humidity, etc. This all makes it quite difficult to determine which ball is actually the smallest one to begin with!
At one point earlier on, I had settled on the design, had about 12 squares made and then came up short on one colour. No matter how much I played with my tension, I just wasn’t getting it to work. So I started over! I bought a more accurate scale, weighed all the balls and found the lightest ones, then adjusted the pattern accordingly. Then it was all ok, with only one or two games of yarn chicken along the way, which I won!
As you can see from the photo above, the yarn I had left over varied greatly across the different colours. Granted, I must say… during the time I was making this I’d been dealing with my frozen shoulder, I’d moved house, and had all sorts of different stressful and happy times. So my tension was all over the map! I’m not even going to lie, I was a hot mess. Somehow, though, it seems to be working out just fine in the end!
Regardless of the extra time and effort that goes into designing with the colour pack, these little beauties are so worth it!
Finally, 112 squares later, I was ready to make this thing look like a blanket! Now, here’s the rub… I had an idea since the very start for what I wanted for the layout for this blanket. It was a very clear idea, but with a few small catches that I was concerned about, so I obsessively tried other arrangements.
No, really… like, I’m sure you’re thinking I’m using that word as an exaggeration, but my testers and some of my fellow Scheepjes Bloggers will tell you that I tormented myself like crazy trying to make sure there wasn’t a layout I liked better. My husband could also describe it at length. Nerissa, from Miss Neriss Designs came to visit me with her daughter last summer and I’m pretty sure she came close to organising an intervention. Have you ever had a project that you picked at incessantly and couldn’t stop fussing with it, when you knew you were way over the top, but couldn’t stop? That was me with this design.
This is a small (honestly, very small, there were so many) sampling of layouts I played with. This is the thing about mitered squares, you can do whatever you want with them! While there were things I liked about each of the million ideas I tried, they just weren’t IT, ya know? They still didn’t work for me in the way my original idea did, even though I’d still not quite figured out how to make that work either. I felt like I’d already seen them all before in some form or another. I really wanted to do something different and make my original idea work somehow. These ideas also didn’t jive with the amount of squares and colours available from the colour pack. Each one would have either left out 2-3 squares or would have required extra additional balls to make the layout count work and I just wasn’t getting into that. I’d already fussed with it enough.
I think in the end I must have had about 200 photos of different arrangements, or small tweaks on the final arrangement. For some reason, and I don’t know if this is just me, I feel like I can see a project clearer when looking at a photo of it than when I just look at it normally. Do any of you have this? It just gives me a better vision of it somehow. So each time I’d rearrange, I’d take a pic, look and see what stands out or needs changing, rearrange a bit, take another pic… endlessly.
Anyway, I got there in the end! It took me a while but I eventually settled on the layout and forced myself to collect my marbles and move on.
There’s not long to wait now that I’ve gotten over that hump, I just have to finish joining and get some nice photos, then I will be back to show you the finished blanket!
Oh, and I think I’m going to need you to help me come up with a name, because that’s a whole other story and I’m coming up absolutely blank. I may think of something before the reveal, but I don’t know, this one escapes me somehow. Be prepared to get your thinking caps on when the time comes, I may need you!
Where To Buy
UK and International buyers will find Stone Washed / River Washed yarns at Woolwarehouse and Black Sheep Wools.
Canadian and International buyers have a great option with Knotty House.
Those of you in the Netherlands can find all you need at Caro’s Atelier.
You can also ask your preferred Scheepjes retailer or find a shop near you!
This post contains affiliate links. This is a way for you to support Canadutch and me as a designer. It is no extra cost to you, but if you shop via one of these links, I get a small percentage of the sale!
