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I started this blanket when I was living with Kirston in Houston. His delightful corgi, Igby, spent a lot of time lying on the wood floor of Kirston's house, and I decided to use some of my scrap yarn to create a blanket for him. I had four skeins of Lion Brand Wool-Ease Thick and Quick (two skeins each of pine and wood), so I opted to use those. Sadly, I ended up purchasing three more skeins of each when the blanket turned out larger than planned, and I didn't use all of it, so I didn't really deplete my oversized yarn stash at all. Still, I created a lovely (I hope) blanket for a lovely dog. The picture doesn't do the blanket justice; I had to spread it out on the living room floor and stand on a stepladder to get the picture. The lighting was terrible, you can see the carpet through the stitches though you can't really on the actual blanket, the cats kept walking over the blanket and tugging it out of shape, and I wasn't tall enough to get a good picture and had to enlist my dad's help. Anyway, the picture-taking was the least of my worries. The knitting itself, which I foolishly thought would be simple since I sketched at least half a dozen patterns and charted the hell out of it before beginning, was a pain in the ass. I made the four squares separately in the order they appear in Igby's name, and I spent a lot of time tinking (for the uninitiated, that's "knit" spelled backwards; means undoing knitting stitch by stitch), frogging (ripping out whole rows . . . "frog" as in "rip it"), and recharting. I made the I and decided the horizontal bars were too narrow and the vertical bar was too wide, so I ripped it out and redid it. The G was a goddam disaster right to the very end. I had to re-chart the damn thing at least three times and reknit it six or seven times total, and even then it wasn't done sucking. When I was sewing the seams, I accidentally pulled the wrong yarn; instead of that which I was using for the seams, I tugged on the yarn of the square of the G and pulled a whole row of it almost into oblivion and had to carefully pluck it back into shape. The B, though I recharted it a couple of times, was mostly okay (and indeed my favorite of the four letters). The Y, though I had to re-chart it several times, went fairly smoothly. I learned how to pick up and knit properly with the border of the blanket (I've had serious trouble with it in the past; don't know why), though I did have some trouble deciding whether to use stockinette or garter stitch; I obviously decided on garter stitch. It turned out larger than I had anticipated; I had planned on something not more than three feet per side, and it ended up closer to four feet tall and three feet wide. This way, though, Kirston can fold it in half or use it as a throw for his bed. |