Finished!

I hope I haven't been confusing readers with my 'backtracking' and publishing posts about our recent holiday...on this coming Sunday we have been home 4 weeks...yes 4 weeks! Amazing really. (Be warned though, I will still continue with the occasional post about our holiday adventures!)

While we were away I bought some acrylic (Robin) yarn and was knitting strips with the idea of making a blanket eventually. 

I made 2 of these strips and it soon became obvious that there had not been enough yarn purchased to make the number of strips needed to make a throw. But the yarn had served its purpose; a mindless project to work on in the evenings and sometimes in the car on longer drives. 

Over the last couple of weeks of the holiday, I wondered what I could do to turn 2 strips into a blanket; preferably by using yarn that I already had in my stash at home. I decided that the solution would not involve knitting garter stitch strips of 50 stitches.

 Then I remembered some Caron remnant balls of yarn that I had bought a few years ago through EBay. The yarn had turned out to be thinner than I expected and I wasn't able to use it for the project that I had in mind at that time. But it would be perfect with the 8ply Robin yarn. I started knitting a WIDE strip with this yarn a day or so after we arrived home.

The very wide strip, almost finished...

I had decided that the 2 narrow strips could be sewn on either side of this strip to make a reasonable sized blanket. To tie in the new knitting with those strips, I did some slip stitch stripes of the colours I had used in those strips. 

Last weekend I finished sewing together the pieces/strips and picked up stitches and knitted a border all around the edge. 

Photo shows the garter stitch strip sewn to one side...

When I walked inside to put the camera away, Mister Eduardo thought he would do his 'quality control inspection'...good news is that he 'passed it'! Lol

Friday Night with Friends...

I had great plans for last night...but I ended up doing just a modest amount of knitting and a lot more dozing in front of the TV. I felt really tired and I wonder whether it was because yesterday I went to a memorial service for a friend's husband and felt so sad for her as he had died very suddenly. The service went for 2 1/2 hours and the chairs seem to become very uncomfortable after the first hour and my poor old back was aching. Any way, no more excuses, let's see what I did achieve last night...tiny progress it may be!

Last FNSI, I had been working on a mohair throw (made with oddments so like a scrap quilt in effect! lol) which was close to completion; in fact I stated in that post that I thought it would all be finished and on the way to its new owner within the week...Wrong!!! lol All the mohair strips had been sewn together since then, plus 2 border strips in a soft black pure wool have been completed and sewn on...

The last 2 black strips are longer than the other 2, but by Thursday night, I had completed one.
It looks dark grey in the photo but is actually black...

So last night I cast on and started to knit the 4th border strip...it's boring knitting even if it does grow quite quickly...:-) By the end of the evening, I had not done very much...so I will just 'plod' on until it's the right length.

While I was taking these photos I thought that I might as well take photos of some of the patterned squares in this throw. the throw is made with oddments of mohair yarns and the 'fancy' squares are all examples of slip stitch. Remember, slipstitches are very easy to do and only one colour is used in each row...they look more complicated than they really are.

The stitches are made by carrying the yarn in front of the work...

 Nice and easy...3 colour

This is the same waffle slip stitch that I used in 'Not Quite 50 Shades with Grey'.

This one came out of a 1980s publication called Silver Needles

.  

This photo is on its side! This was a new slip stitch design that I tried and I would use it again. but adjust the number of stitches to compensate for the 'pulling in' of the knitting

 The next square is a 3 colour slip stitch but the photo doesn't do justice to the colours that I used.

The next one is great for using up scraps of yarn...

The next one is a 3 colour tweed slip stitch...

Good old 'Honeycomb' next...always looks good!

Another wavy slip stitch square...

The next one also uses 3 colours...

If any readers would like instructions for any of these slip stitch designs just leave a comment to that effect. I'm more than happy to share. 

My last post was about knitting and Linn from here left a lovely comment about the examples of my work. Thank you Linn, but trust me, the actual knitting is VERY simple. Maybe tackling a throw with 194 stitches per row might be a bit intimidating at first but why not try the pattern out (double click on it to make it larger and hopefully readable) on say, a scarf? With scraps of 8 ply, 4.50 needles for example and 42 stitches, a beautiful scarf would quickly emerge. On a smaller scale why not knit a mini scarf in Christmas colours for a favourite teddy??? (that's for us here in Australia but in places where it's cold a human-sized one would be great to make and wear)

This baby blankie is made with variegated yarn with soft white acrylic yarn as main colour. The pattern is the waffle pattern, the same as the baby throw in the previous post, but even easier to knit as only 2 colours :-)