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?

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?

I never thought I’d actually see this day.  Okay, to be fair, when I started the Wedding Blanket I had every intention of being done in time for my friend’s wedding on Sept 17th, 2010, and I’m only 13 months late (not counting however long it will take to get plane tickets to visit her and give it to her in person), but once I’d started the project and realized how much of a shrink hole it was, I’d despaired of ever seeing the end of it.

But, my lovelies, it is well and truly done.

All the ends are woven in, all the seams are done, all the pieces are blocked, all the parts are knitted – there is nothing at all left to do on this blanket.

Nothing, that is, but marvel at its beauty.  I’m not sure exactly where it all came from, but there is some absolutely gorgeous stuff in this blanket.  Such as the mitered corners on the border (which were in no small part responsible for my need to do corrective surgery on it).  Totally worth the hassle now, though.

Or the sheer elegance of cables and traditional stitch patterns worked at scale.

Or what a lovely package it makes, all folded up and ready to be gifted to a not-quite-newly married couple.

Now that it’s all done, I’m starting to wonder…

…what if I kept it for myself and told her I’d lost it?  That would be wrong, right?  Sigh.  Maybe I’ll just have to knit a second one for myself.

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?

I’m completely done with sewing on one side of the border of the Wedding Blanket I. One side.

There are three more to go. It’s at this point that I start thinking maybe a circular blanket isn’t such a bad idea. Sure, the edge is longer, but on the flip side there’s only one of them.

I think if that made any sense to you, you should probably consider taking a nap. Seriously.

Speaking of, the Wedding Blanket I is currently enjoying a deep sleep in the bookshelf, out of reach of monkey kitty.

Doesn’t it just look so peaceful? I’d really hate to bother it by taking it out to sew on it some more…

Not buying it? Crap, I didn’t think you would. Maybe next time I post I’ll have 1.25 sides done…

I’m not sure exactly where I am anymore – I seem to have lost track sometime this weekend when I was having my fourth meal with my out-of-town family members.  I don’t suppose that would seem odd to most of you, to have four meals with your visiting family – but this was also the fourth city we were eating in, and the shortest distance between any two meals was about an hour…and those two meals weren’t consecutive.

The knitting, of course, continues apace.  The Blanket Thief supports my “productive activity” of knitting by driving to many of these long-distance things, which means I’m now at 12.5 of 16 blocks on the Wedding Blanket II.  Unfortunately for you (I’m quite grateful), the 13th block looks just like all the previous 12, so no interest there.  I also can’t show you the nifty new technique I’m using to build it up, since doing so would reveal too much of the pattern before the recipient actually gets it.

So, having nothing to show you from my needles today, I instead leave you with a video of the Flash Mob at the Sock Summit this year.  One day I too will join hundreds of knitters in a dance somewhere.  Just wait.

It’s been a long time coming, but, finally, I’ve begun sewing on the border for the Wedding Blanket the First.

There were several roadblocks to getting here.

I had to knit 28 feet of border.

I had to block 28 feet of border.

I had to remove about 1 foot on two sides of the border.

I had to figure out what the ratio of border stitches to edge stitches was.  This involved a decent amount of basic algebra and a lot of counting.  It also didn’t have the decency to be a nice round number and ended up being something like 1:0.651725, which means a lot of recounting to make sure I’m not drifting too far away from the real ratio.

But, finally, I have, in fact, started sewing the damn thing on.

It’s not going nearly as slowly as I expected – I’m getting through more than a foot per hour.  At this rate, there’s a chance (small though it may be) that I’ll finish the whole blanket before the happy couple’s first anniversary.

Of course, they’re still going to have to wait to get it, since I’ve decided that a gift like this really needs to be given in person, and I don’t have tickets to Ohio booked yet.  But, some day (and likely within 18 months of the day it was supposed to be delivered), I’ll have delivered the first Wedding Blanket.

Then I’ll just have 11 months to finish Erica’s…and whatever other Wedding Blanket might get promised as soon as a certain someone is officially engaged.

Oh, yeah, and some day I’ll have to finish the Blanket Thief‘s cARGHdigan.  You know, the one I promised him for Christmas of 2009.

I was honored to be one of the bridesmaids at my friend Erica’s wedding a couple weekends ago.  It was the first time I’d ever bridesmaided (I’m totally making that a word), and no one in my family has had a wedding involving bridesmaids, so I got to learn about all sorts of nifty traditions that I had never known about before.

Like, for example, not only do the guests give the couple presents (everyone knew about that one, right?), but the bride gives the bridesmaids presents!

Erica being the lovely woman that she is, she decided to personalize the gifts for each of us.  So, along with a bunch of other stuff that I found absolutely charming, delightful, wonderful, or all three, I found:

Sock yarn from Spud & Chloe, in the perfect shade of green.  This completely matches the wedding present my mother-in-law gave me when I got married, and has made me come to a realization.

All weddings should involve giving me yarn.  Or, at least, they should if I’m doing something more significant than attending them.  I guess it’s not a requirement if you’re just going to invite me to any wedding…

…although, quite frankly, I wouldn’t mind if it was.

In the past week, I’ve done exactly zero knitting.

I know.  I’m shocked too.  I didn’t know it was possible for me to live without knitting for so long.  I don’t even have a good explanation for it, either – I wasn’t injured, I wasn’t trapped anywhere without yarn, and even though yesterday was Erica’s wedding (which was lovely), I really wasn’t even that busy this week either.  (If you’re thinking of getting married, by the way, I really think you should talk to her about the magic she pulled together.  The whole month before her wedding, she turned down any and all offers to help with, “Oh, no, don’t worry about it, it’s totally under control.”  And she wasn’t lying at all.)

Frankly, I think I must be ill.

I didn’t even touch the Wedding Blanket, even though I’m finally at the last (infinite) step of sewing on the border.

Nor did I knit anything on the Wedding Blanket II, despite the wedding this weekend being near perfect motivation.

If I’d wanted variety, I could have worked a bit on the Blanket Thief‘s cARGHdigan, which has been sitting patiently in a box next to the couch for months while I was distracted on Wedding Blankets I and II.  (Note to self: next time, don’t promise husband a sweater until after said sweater is done.  Also, don’t encourage said husband to pick thin yarn for said sweater.)

And, really, there were plenty of times when I was out and about that I could have been knitting, and just…wasn’t.  I’ve had this pair of socks in my purse for months as well, but I don’t think I’ve knit on them in weeks, easily.

I must be ill.  There’s no other possible explanation.