This WIP has been through many phases. It started ten years ago with the purchase of yarn. Caron Wintinuk-cheap acrylic that was on clearance at the time, but it was my first major yarn purchase and I was getting ready to be a poor college student... I got skeins in navy blue, variegated denim blue, cream and off-white.
Then came the design phase. I had enough to knit a blanket, so I figured find a stitch pattern that was simple, but enough to keep my attention for the span of blanket knitting. I chose a feather & fan pattern, and modified it. I call it garter feather and fan.
Row 1: Knit
Row 2: k1, (k2tog twice, yo k4 four times k2tog twice) to last stitch, k1
Rows 3-4: Knit
To make the most of the yarn I decided to do wide stripes. When I mean wide stripes- I meant I knit as much of the skein as possible. The cream and off-white clashed when I knit them in large blocks, but didn't look bad when knit in two-row stripes. So color stripes went as thus:
Chunk1: (Two rows of cream
two rows of off-white) repeat four rows in feather pattern
Chunk 2: Variegated denim
Chunk 3: Navy
Chunk 4: Variegated denim
Chunk 5: (Two rows of creamtwo rows of off-white) repeat four rows in feather pattern
Repeat chunks two through five.
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| Ak! A blue striped ghost! |
I had enough yarn to do four repeats of "chunk" pattern. However after the third repeat it, the blanket was almost six feet long. So I bound off and wove in the ends. My roommates were awed. That was fall of 2006.
After years of use, the blanket has stretched wider, making it less long. Shrinkage plus excess yarn still in the stash were major factors in my attempt to lengthen the blanket and de-stash. So in the fall of 2011 I un-did the bind off (and scoffed at how poorly I wove in ends) and put the blanket back on the needles. After one skein (variegated), I got tired of the project and put it back in storage.
When the idea of a WIP themed blog hop came up on Ravelry, I jumped at the chance to take one of my projects out of deep storage. I had to rip back most of the most 'recently' knit skein because I inserted an extra knit row, but since then I have been plowing through it-despite the unseasonably warm temps.
The most recently knitted is on the right, after a washing and use, it will open up like the rest of the blanket (see the cream part).
