G. Knerd

I’m not exactly sure how it happened, but despite having many more seams than the first Wedding Blanket, Wedding Blanket II is all seamed up.  I can’t show you the whole thing, as that woudl give away the surprise, but I can show you what it looks like right this moment:

What is that tangled mass, you ask?  Well, that’s what happens when you take a blanket that’s just short of about 5′ square and pick up stitches along the entire outside edge.

Yes, that’s right.  In a stroke of crazy genius (or, even, crazy-genius), I decided that there would be no more seaming on this blanket, and promptly (“promptly” here defined as “over the course of several hours”) picked up over a thousand stitches around the edge.  Actually, the real count is closer to 1.5K, but…well, y’all don’t like hearing about the exact numbers when I come up with them.

So, now, it’s just a matter of knitting and purling a few rounds in the two colors until I like how it looks, binding off (ooh, don’t want to think about that one…), and weaving in a few ends.  Really, I’m quite nearly done.

I’m really glad it’s very cold here – while knitting on this, there’s no way to hold it except everything on your lap.  That’s pretty awesome right now with the frost outside, but if this were the middle of summer…well, let’s just say Erica would be waiting a little longer for this one.  Let’s just hope that I do manage to finish this one before the weather gets cold again, though, shall we?

I’ll be the first to admit that I’ve had counting problems in the past.  I’d like to say that usually I can make it to at least twenty without an issue, but experience would say otherwise.  For the Wedding Blanket II, though, I’m not sure if what I’m experiencing is a counting problem or negligence.

Remember when I started this thing, and I mentioned that putting the yarn together to knit from was like knitting from a kit?

So…each kit made four squares.  And I’ve gone through four kits.

However, I only have fifteen squares on the pile.

I really do not know how this happened.  I’ve got a few theories, though:

1. Gnomes and/or stash weasels
2. I didn’t finish one of the kits for some reason
3. I did knit a sixteenth square, but put it somewhere it wasn’t supposed to be

Now, if theory 1 or 2 is correct, I should cast on another square and just get it finished.  On the other hand, if theory 3 turns out to be right then I’ll end up with seventeen squares (because you just know I’ll find the missing square as soon as I finish the replacement), and since seventeen is a prime number that would make a pretty odd-shaped blanket.

For now, I’m somewhat ignoring the issue by doing everything else that needs to be done, like sewing up a small seam in the middle of each square and weaving in the ends in the center.  I’m not going to tell you how many ends that will end up being, but if you want a bit of a hint…

…it’s a lot.

Also, I really do have to figure out what I’m going to do about the border at some point.  Let me know if you have any suggestions…

When I was in first grade, we had a unit on learning to count.  We’re not talking just one through ten, either – oh no, we were graded on whether we could recite, in front of the entire class, the numbers from one to one hundred.

It doesn’t sound so hard now, but at the time…terrifying.  I was a shy little Asian girl in a really, really white elementary school with a racist teacher who thought I had Down’s Syndrome (and then yelled at me when I did better than the other kids).  Getting up in front of everyone scared the living snot out of me.

Also, I had trouble with the eighties.  To this day, I’m always a little cautious about counting past seventy-nine.  I’ll pause for a moment, think really hard, and cautiously go with, “eighty? Eighty-one…”

The other day, one of my friends and I were arguing about counting in base-ten vs. base-two, and he commented that “No one has trouble counting!  It’s an inherent human trait!  Who could possibly have trouble counting?!”

At which point I raised my hand, and I swear I lost like three whole Respect Points™ in that moment.

Anyway, all of that was a really long way of explaining why when I suddenly realized that I’d recently finished knitting a few more squares for Wedding Blanket II, and was well into yet another, but I hadn’t actually counted my progress in a long time, I felt a moment of panic.  In fact, I couldn’t remember the last time I’d counted my progress.

I’m sure if I went back in the archives, it would be on this blog, but…er…I’m inefficiently lazy.

Anyway, I dug out all the squares for the blanket, starting with the most recent additions.

I…er…might have a habit of making small little bundles as I finish each one.  It serves absolutely no purpose, but it tends to make me happy and that’s all that matters, right?

Anyway, I unfolded those and laid them out on the stack with the rest of them and started counting.

That, my friends, is thirteen whole blocks for this blanket.  I think that means that if I’d wanted to bail at a 3×4 block blanket, I missed.

However, luckily, I was planning to knit a 4×4 block blanket, so I’m still good to go.  I mean, sure, in the back of my head was the thought that I had an escape route planned if it became too much, and the recipients would never know… (Except now they would, and I think I’ve mentioned the plan for 16 blocks before, so that was really more of a fairy tale I told myself.)  Just three more squares, and I can start the border for this thing.

Anyone have a good idea for a border to go with this one?  You know, without me showing you what the blanket actually looks like, because I have to somewhat hide it from the newly created husband-and-wife duo it’s intended for?