Thing-a-day.com

Well, I didn’t do very well with this Thing-a-day thing lol. I’m such the slacker and missed so many days, but nonetheless, Thing-a-day did get some creative juices flowing in my head.

Yesterday I made a throw for my son following the guidelines from here but on a larger scale. The front of the throw is flannel and the back is so super soft and cozy. It was fairly quick to make and was completed in about 3 hours.

And a photo of my little monkey wrapped up in his monkey blanket.

I’ve been knitting for my blanket again today. Counting all the squares I had done before Thing a Day started I have six and a half now  (and also lots of cool things from the other days of the project when I didn’t make blanket squares).

I blocked the six I have and laid them out so now I have a much clearer idea of how many squares accross it will need to be - probably 4 but maybe 5 or 6 depending on how wide I want it and in terms of length I suspect I’m going to need maybe 8 - 10 rows.  i think it’s going to depend how I join them together.

I also emptied out a box I’ve been looking at and meaning to organise for months.

Tomorrow I plan to attempt to learn to crochet whcih is something I’ve wanted to learn since well before I learned to knit (and I’ve been knitting for about a year now).  Any tips or tricks or advice as to a quick one day project for a beginner would be more than welcome!

Here’s the first completed strip of the baby blanket I’m making. Six more of these (each knitted in the same sequence but starting with a different color), and then a whole lot of clumsy seaming, and poof! that is one overheated baby!

Each square is about 5 x 5 inches, unblocked. (And it’s superwash wool, so presumably it won’t shrink.) The finished blanket will therefore measure about 35 inches square.

The nice thing about this project is that knitting row after row of garter stitch is so easy that even a feckless, mistake-prone pseudoknitter like me can manage to read while knitting, without screwing anything up. I’ve been catching up on a lot of unperused browser tabs, therefore, and picking up my knitting while I wait for my sloooooow computer to process commands.

The first square of a forty-nine-square baby blanket I’m knitting for my brother’s forthcoming sprog.

The whole blanket will be knitted in Knit Picks Swish DK, on Denise interchangeable needles. The pattern is the Circle of Friends Garter Stitch Blanket (except that I don’t have any friends helping me) from Joelle Hoverson’s Last-Minute Knitted Gifts.

Yes, I realize that it’s kind of sad that I have to follow a pattern for something this simple, but there you have it—I am a follower of patterns. I measure most of the ingredients when I cook, too. At least I changed the yarn and colors. This square is in Moss (as in The IT Crowd). Next up: Storm (as in X-Men). I will try as hard as I can to encourage this kid to be a geek.