Unfinished Project Profile: the Blue Blanket

If you read last week’s introductory post, you will have seen that my rules for crafting include a stipulation that, on any given day, I must knit at least two rows on the Blue Blanket before working on any other craft project.  That’s because the blue blanket, although a much beloved project, is becoming something of an Albatross.  

At about three years old, it’s been in the works for a while, but is nowhere near my oldest unfinished project. (I just recently finished assembling an afghan whose squares I started to crochet more than ten years ago.) 

At two layers, each 259 stitches wide and 622 rows long*, it may very well be my biggest unfinished project, but that's not the main reason why the blue blanket gets pride of place.

No, the reason why the blue blanket comes before all other projects is because it's for my nephew, and although I started it several months before he was born, I'm beginning to wonder whether he's going to get it before he goes off to college.

Well, actually, it's as much for my brother as for my nephew.  I have some doubts as to whether it will actually reach my nephew or be confiscated by his father.  You see, the blue blanket has a history...

When my brother was very young, my grandmother knitted him a blanket.  It was dark blue on one side and light blue on the other, with a simple diamond lace pattern and a crochet border.  It was warm and soft and cuddly, and about the right size for a standard twin bed.  

When my brother was 12 years old, I was born.  My parents, figuring that my brother had probably outgrown the security blanket stage, gave the blanket to me, and I loved it.  

I have no idea whether my brother was actually upset by the loss, or simply wanted to provoke me (in the manner of older brothers everywhere), but by the time I was old enough to be aware of what he was doing, he made a habit of stealing back the blue blanket, to my intense dismay and alarm.  I would wail and run frantically about the house searching for it until it was safely back in my room. 

This ritual continued well after my brother went away to college and on into my teen years; without fail, every time my brother came home, he would sneak into my room, steal the blanket, and hide it somewhere in the house.

Now that I'm thirty<mumble> years old, and a supposedly mature adult, I still have that blanket and sleep with it every night.  It's still warm and soft and cuddly, if a little bit worse for wear after 40+ years of active service.  My brother has a much more difficult time stealing it now.

So, when in late 2011 my brother and his wife announced that they were going to have a baby, I knew what I had to do.  My nephew needed a blue blanket of his own.

I went to JoAnn's fabrics with my mother and we found a soft, cuddly, machine-washable acrylic yarn that more or less matched the original, and she bought me seven balls of each color.  I dug out my grandmother's old knitting books, found the stitch pattern that most closely resembled the blanket, and cast on.  I am not a terribly fast knitter, but even so, I thought, "my sister-in-law isn't due for another several months; I should be able to finish this blanket without too much trouble."  

Oh, the hubris!

Approximately three years later, I'm still working on the blanket.  (In my defense, I did move halfway around the world AND plan my wedding in that time, including catering it ourselves and making my husband's outfit as well as my own.) Over the Christmas 2014 holiday, I finally finished the first layer of the blanket.  The second layer is approximately four inches long now.  My rather ambitious goal for the new year is to try and finish one pattern repeat (12 rows) every week, which will have me finished sometime around Christmas 2015.  

*It takes me, on average, about 45 minutes to complete two rows--sometimes it's significantly less, but sometimes I find a mistake and spend an extra 25 minutes trying to figure out what I did wrong and how to fix it. That means that, when complete, this blanket will have taken me approximately 466.5 hours of work, not including the crochet borders.

The colors I chose for the new Blue Blanket, sitting on top of the original Blue Blanket, which is looking a little faded after 40+ years of active service.  The new blanket in progress can just be seen peeking out on the left.

The project specs are as follows:

• Yarn: Caron Simply Soft, 12 balls each of Soft Blue and Berry Blue
• Note: as of finishing the first layer of the blanket, I still have two unused balls of the first color.  I had intended to knit until I had just one ball left (kept in reserve for the crochet border), but I couldn't bear to look at it anymore and desperately yearned for a significant milestone, like being done with the first layer.  As it is, the blanket is long enough to wrap around my feet and still come up to my chin, and I'm 5'11".  My brother is a tiny bit taller than I am and his wife is a few inches shorter, so I figure that the odds of their son being significantly taller than I am are a bit slim.
• Simply soft is a slightly chunkier yarn than the original.  I don''to know whether that's because it's just got an extra ply, or because it has lost some volume from repeated washings.  Two layers of simply soft makes for a very thick, squashy blanket.  One would probably be warm enough on it's own, but then it wouldn't be an accurate replica.
• Needles: Erm, teeny? I don't have a needle gauge, but I know I'm using smaller needles than the yarn label recommends... Either way, you want circular needles, as long as you can find.  
• Pattern:
• Cast on 259 stitches, placing a marker after the fifth stitch, then after every 10 stitches from that point onward, leaving you with 4 stitches after the last marker at the end. (I.e. 25 pattern repeats of 10 stitches each, plus 5 stitches for a selvedge at the beginning of the row and 4 at the end.  The uneven selvedge is because the diamond pattern is actually 9 stitches wide, with one extra stitch at the end of each row to provide a space in between the diamonds.  In order to make the border the same width on each side, you need to account for that extra stitch at the end of the last pattern repeat.  Plus, having a different number of stitches before the first stitch marker on even and odd numbered rows makes it easier to keep track of whether I'm supposed to be knitting a pattern row or a plain row.
• Knit 5 rows plain to form a border.  
• If I were starting this blanket again, I'd probably either increase this to 7 rows or make a narrower selvedge (3/4 stitches instead of 4/5) because the plain knit border at the sides is slightly wider than the border at the top and bottom.
• Knit in diamond stitch until blanket is the desired length, ending on row 1: 
• row 1: k5, *k2, k2tog, yo, k1, yo, skp, k3* to last stitch marker, k4
• Row 2 and all even rows: k to end
• Row 3: k5, *k1, k2tog, yo, k3, yo, skp, k2* to last stitch marker, k4
• Row 5: k5, *k2tog, yo, k5, yo, skp, k1* to last stitch marker, k4
• Row 7: k5, *yo, skp, k5, k2tog, yo, k1* to last stitch marker, k4
• Row 9: k5, *k1, yo, skp, k3, k2tog, yo, k2* to last stitch marker, k4
• Row 11: k5, *k2, yo, skp, k1, k2tog, yo, k3* to last stitch marker, k4
• To finish, knit 5 rows plain, then bind off.
• Knit two layers, one in each color, making sure to knit the same number of rows/pattern repeats on each layer.
• To join, place both layers wrong sides together and, using the light blue yarn, sc around the entire blanket, catching both layers. Make 3 sc in each corner. Fasten off.
• For the second round, switch to the dark blue and make a simple shell stitch border: sc, *skip 2, 5 dc (or tr--haven't tested this yet) in 3rd sc from corner, skip 2, sc in 3rd stitch* all the way around the blanket.  At corners, you may need to skip 1 stitch instead of two so that the sc always falls on the corner.