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I Am My Own Stash Weasel

Sometimes, I quite outsmart myself.  And, actually, if I’m quite honest with myself, I outsmart myself with surprising regularity.

Take, for example, the issue I was having with the Wedding Blanket II, where I was apparently missing a square.  I was sure I’d knit sixteen blocks, but only had fifteen in the shelf where the blocks were supposed to be, and I didn’t have enough yarn left in any of my “kits” to create another one.  Still, I couldn’t find the missing block, and I’d finally decided to give up and risk knitting an extra block just so I could continue making forward progress on the blanket.

Even after I’d made another “kit”, though, something was nagging at me.  I was sure I’d knitted another block, and I really, really didn’t want to knit an extra (after all, what would I do with it?).  But days passed, and I didn’t find it (not, mind you, that I was really looking – I think I expected it to fall out of the ceiling on my head or something).  Plus, it seemed like the universe didn’t want me to start it – any time I had some free knitting time to start it, I would manage to do something to damage my hands, preventing me from knitting at all.  Once it was sticks of wood left over from my massive home improvement project slicing my fingers open when I went to get the yarn from the bookshelf.

A person should listen to messages like that.

Last week, I was grabbing some yarn and fiber for Fiber Weekend at my Mother-in-Law’s house (details on that forthcoming in the next post), and without warning, I found the missing block!

As soon as my fingers touched it, it all came flooding back to me.  I’d decided to try blocking one of the squares to make sure nothing bad would happen and determine if blocking was either strictly necessary or just kind of a good idea for the rest of the blanket.  Once the square was dry, I’d wrapped it up in the normal package structure and put it on top of a pile of yarn, thinking that I’d soon be cleaning the office and would move the block when I put the yarn away.

Obviously, I did not end up cleaning the office like I thought – instead, I apparently ended up adding more yarn to the pile (where the new yarn came from is unclear, as I’ve generally been good about sticking to the yarn diet) and covering up the square entirely.

Monkey Kitty immediately investigated the new discovery, and there were some flashes of teeth before I scooped it up again and put it safely with its breathren.

Meanwhile, I decided to use the “kit” I’d made to start swatching a border, since that’s coming up next.  I tried a slip stitch thing first, but…

…well, I really just wasn’t thrilled with it.  It looked kind of odd, and it didn’t match the character of the blanket either.  Unfortunately, that was the only border in the whole Knitting On the Edge book that I thought was even close to right.

Then I remembered an article I’d read once about mathematical series of stripes being pleasing to humans, so I thought I’d try out a border of stripes built on Fibonacci numbers.

Bingo.  Plus, added bonus, it can be knitted on to the blanket instead of needing to be seamed.  It’s win-win.  The only question that’s left to answer is: should it be grey-blue-grey-blue-grey, or blue-grey-blue-grey-blue?

Thoughts?