Damn, Knit & Blast It

How does being bored with knitting plain socks on the train turn into an afternoon designing a blanket?

Here’s how…

I sat asking myself, “What can I knit on the train that’s not socks?”

Squares for a blanket maybe?

Out came my two Debbie Abrahams blanket books.

These two…

I made my Denim Blankie from one of these books – the one that hangs over my bed - they’ve been faves ever since.

After much deliberation and work with a calculator I decided it was going to be expensive! Maybe my excessive stash could yield some yarn to ease the cost?

I rummaged,  I “stash dived” (“stash dove”??), I emerged, gasping, from under the bed with three bags full of Jaeger Matchmaker DK that I snapped up in a sale a couple of years ago. Ten  balls of each of these colours….

Ooohhhh! That says “Flower Power” to me!!

The Flower Power pattern in”Blankets and Throws to Knit” uses 40 balls of Rowan Wool cotton in  8 different colours.

Like this…

I didn’t want anything quite that colourful plus I had been previously been  “Wowed” by Minxxy’s blue and white version of Flower Power. I kinda liked the “restrained palette” idea.

Hmmmm…How do I get three colours into an eight colour blanket? I am wise enough to know, especially after seeing how carefully the Denim Blankie pattern was laid out, that just doing random squares and hoping it would look OK wasn’t going to work for me. I am way too structured in my thinking to be able to tolerate an unbalanced, higgledy piggledy blanket.

Anyone who works with me knows, I’ll try and bend any problem into an opportunity to play with drawing pictures in Visio ( PC diagramming software).

So I sat and drew…

I drew stripy squares, plain squares and flowery squares….

I coloured them in every possible combination of the three colours….

I arranged them, confused myself, swore a bit and rearranged them….

I made Ben come and look…

“Ermmm, Honey….You’ve been working on this for ages – shouldn’t you save it?”  Said Ben.

Phew – One clumsy lumbering ginger cat and it could have been lost!!

Relax! It’s saved now!!

Want to see what I came up with?

The pattern is the same dimensions as the original blanket – 9×13 squares but I’m not sure if I’ll have enough wool. I’ll make vertical strips of 9 squares and hopefully it’ll not be obvious if I have to stop – that’s one of the reasons I decided on a straight forward, repeating pattern and not a complex “centered” one like Debbie Abrahams often does (Who an I kidding – this was hard enough – I don’t have her talent!!)

Here’s the breakdown of the square’s I’m going to need if I do the entire blanket…

You’ll notice that there’s 6 different flowers – there were 8 in the original pattern! I will play with the flowers a little, basing them on Debbie’s designs from the book. At least with my plan I can see what the main background and petal colours need to be.

Watch this space for flower fun…