I Jumped On That Bandwagon

A knitting bandwagon that is. I have made four of the five patterns on Ravelry with the most projects. I have no plans to make it five out of five but I have started another popular pattern. It doesn’t show up in the most popular as there are many variations – free and for purchase. I have started a mitred square blanket, also known as a sock yarn blanket or cozy memories blanket. I find it interesting that with so many variations out there, people are still publishing patterns for purchase. I’m not saying they shouldn’t charge for their patterns, just that I cannot see the need for more of this particular design.

I have not wanted to make a blanket with my left overs as either you have to sew a lot of squares together or you are working on a large blanket. I think that is why many people are gung-ho at the start when there are few squares but give up when you are picking up stitches on a heavy blanket. But I do have many leftovers from all the socks I have knitted. And there are many socks made before I started blogging and Ravelry only has projects from when I joined not older projects.

What to do with unused yarn? When there are so many sock patterns and I had so much yarn, why use remains to knit socks? Although one month I did join the challenge of making socks from left overs and I do wear the socks.
(And weird aside, I noticed in that post I used the expression gung-ho. I didn’t know I used it that much in writing but obviously when I talk about left over yarn.)

I make notes about ideas for my crafting. This may be things I would like to make on vacation or ideas for the next year. At some point I had written “Knit Wrap minis one a month/week”. I have no idea what “knit wrap minis” means. Had I seen a pattern for a wrap that used mini skeins? Anyway, I took that as a nudge to do something with my partial skeins of yarn. I had written that note a while before I started the Advent wrap, where I used 13 partial skeins but not completely used up any of them. So I needed a big project to make a dent in my leftovers. But I didn’t want to knit or crochet a big blanket. Let’s make it clear, I have nothing against the big blankets people are knitting or crocheting, I just don’t want to make one. But I do want to use my scraps.

On a podcast a presenter had made a combination mitred square/log cabin blanket. She had made blocks of mitred squares, edged them as a log cabin blanket and then sewn them together to make a blanket. As I want my blanket to be at least double-bed size so that it is usable this method will be easy to work and only become unwieldy when I sew the squares together. I just had to decide two things, how big to make each individual square and if there was going to be any thought to which yarns I used. Oh and which method for the center decreases.

I grouped my yarns by colour and will work squares based on a colour/shade. I wanted squares to be approx 4 inches and calculated how many stitches to cast on. I looked at various patterns and chose the knit 2 together and SSK decreases. I also started out with a knitted cast on as written in one pattern but have changed that to a cable cast on. The other thing I calculated was how much I would have to knit to have enough blocks for a blanket by the end of the year. I estimated that I would need to knit a block of nine squares every week. Having completed the first block, I am not going to keep that pace as I found that my other knitting is being neglected. So I won’t have a finished blanket by the end of the year but by the end of 2019?