Sweet Dreams Throw

Patience is a virtue...

To avoid the house becoming overrun with little knitted purses and toys, I've resolved to attempt some more substantial knitting projects this year. This is my first one, a simple garter stitch knitted blanket.

The pattern was featured in my 2011 Knitting Calendar and comes from Knit Picks in the USA. As Knit Picks yarn is not readily available in the UK, I substituted three shades of Debbie Bliss Luxury Tweed Chunky from Yarn Box. Although meant for the same 6.5mm needle size, I suspect my Debbie Bliss yarn was heavier than the recommended Knit Picks Suri Dream as I ended up needing 9 x 100g hanks, which at £7.95 a hank (and that's with 20% off) made this a relatively pricey project.

Knitting the throw was very zen as it's just simple 30 stitch wide strips of garter strip with either 16 or 26 rows of each of the three colours. It was moderately important to keep track of the number of rows so the strips would match up, so I used my Clover row counter and then checked the number of ridges too.

I reduced the size of the blanket slightly by taking out one block of the pattern on each strip and by making the centre strip of the five half as wide and completing it all in the pink shade.

There was a fair mount of weaving in to do on each strip as I broke off the colour for each rectangle. Joining the strips together was mildly painful as the yarn tended to break off when sewing. However, I was pleased with the neatness of the join I made by sewing under the ridges of the end rows of each strip from side to side. Happily all my strips turned out the same length so my counting must have been reasonable.

It has taken me a few weeks to get through this, partly because I've been breaking off for crochet and other projects. However, it's nice to finish something substantial. I've got a fox stole, a floor cushion and a castle lined up as major knits for later in the year too.

Melx