The Year-Long Blanket Slog, C'est Fini

It took months of planning, math skills I had forgotten about entirely, two excel spreadsheets, over 2 pounds of yarn, and a year of knitting, but it's finally done. May I present to you, the Maize and Blue Stained Glass Blanket:

It's 74 inches long, 53 inches wide, and very very warm. I developed the pattern using the long cabin knitting technique popularized by the Mason Dixon Knitting duo Kay Gardiner and Anne Shayne. If you too would like to knit one of your very own, I'm hoping to have a functioning pattern up for sale on Ravelry in the near future.

Last Christmas, my little brother got a bag of yarn and a promise, and this year, after buying yet more yarn because that bag was just not enough, I came through on that promise. The sketch I showed him last year has become a blanket. A big blanket, every stitch infused with team spirit.

Since finishing this giant time-suck of a blanket, I have already finished three hats (one for my husband, one for my son, and one for my brother-in-law) and am in mid-completion of a fourth (requested by my boss). Think of how many hats I could have if I had made hats instead of a blanket. It boggles the mind, really.

Garter Stitch

I am a bind off away from finishing the penultimate section of the Maize and Blue Stained Glass Blanket. This section is a rectangle, roughly 42 inches wide and 9 inches tall, done in off-white Red Heart Super Saver in a colorway called "Aran." The beauty of this section that makes it such a sigh of relief: it's comprised entirely of garter stitch.

If you are new to the lingo of the knitting world, garter stitch is one of the two workhorse stitch patterns that make up most knitted fabrics. The other is stockinette stitch.

For flat knitting, garter stitch is what happens when you knit every stitch of every row, resulting in V-shaped knit stitches for every other row, with the bump-shaped purl stitch for the rows in between. This happens because knitting creates knit stitches and when knitting back and forth on a flat piece of fabric, the knit stitch is created on opposite sides of the fabric for every row. The purl stitch is really just the backside of a knit stitch, so on one side of the fabric, the first row will be knits and the second will appear as purls and the other side will have a first row of purls and a second row of knits. Garter stitch is reversible, looking fairly identical no matter which side of the fabric faces front.

To create stockinette stitch when knitting flat, you have to learn how to purl. Purling creates purl stitches. Thus, stockinette stitch, which involves knitting for a row and then purling for a row, results in all the knits being on one side of the fabric and all the purls being on the other.

 

When the main side of the garment is the purl bump side, this is called reverse stockinette stitch.

For circular knitting, because you knit every row from the same direction, the reverse is true: knitting every row creates stockinette stitch and garter stitch requires purling every other row.

I love really complex stitch patterns and unique constructions on small projects. It makes them take a little more time, but that's okay, because they really don't take too much time in the first place. A 70-inch by 50-inch flat-knit blanket, however, is just huge, so for something this time-consuming, I'd rather it not take any more time than necessary. Most of the sections, though, required lace patterning or color work, each of which takes a long time to do compared to the ever-efficient garter stitch (not to mention a significant amount of concentration and the added time required to figure out the charting). Hence the year it's taken to get this far.

I'm so into this nice, easy, meditative garter stitch. Just one knit after the other until this blanket is done.

...Well... almost done. There will need to be a crocheted edging. And possibly a fabric backing. But the blanket will be totally done knit-wise. Of course, first I have to buy another skein of the Caron worsted weight in Cape Cod. I've run out of blue yarn, and this last section, all blue.

The blanket. Again.

There I was, knitting up a storm on row 120 of the Maize and Blue stained glass blanket M square when it happened. I ran out of yellow yarn. Fortunately, I'm knitting this blanket, as it is going a brother deficient in laundry prowess (as they all seem to be), in Red Heart Super Saver, so I just hopped on down to my local Jo-Ann's and picked up another ball of the gold colorway. The beauty of RHSS yarns, if you are not aware, is that they do not have a colorway. All of them are exactly the same color. This means I can start mid-top left-hand corner of the M and no one will know that there's a new ball of yarn there, unless I really fudge up the finishing. Either way, the cat seems to like it, so there's that.

I know. I know. There are those among you readers (if you are of the yarn-loving persuasion) who are cringing in their super-fine, lace-knit, mohair-blend gradient shawls that I just enthusiastically admitted that I sometimes (and by sometimes, I mean for the past year almost exclusively) knit with, not just acrylic (low as that is) but RH acrylic. And to you I say: get over it. I love and prefer natural fiber as much as the next knitter, but I'm not uber-wealthy, nor am I wasting wool on a project that may end up shredded by the still-existing claws of my brother's found-in-the-wild but "domesticated" cat. Why I'm wasting a year of knitting time on a blanket that may well suffer this fate is a subject best left for my psychoanalyst, should I ever get a psychoanalyst.

Seriously, though, I am definitely not a yarn snob. I have a few clearance-purchased (or gifted) rare skeins of the good stuff, but usually, I'm just happy if I can manage to afford a wool-blend. I have never owned a skein of madeline tosh, nor have I ever seen a skein of Wollmeise in person. Really, when it come down to it, this blanket looks awesome no matter what it's made of.

No more yarn-related incidents occurred and I finished the M square on Monday night, weaved in ends on Tuesday, and then put the whole thing in a no-spin rinse cycle and delicate dry cycle. After all, it's too cumbersome to bother blocking and I did make it out of washing-machine-friendly yarn.

This blanket is now officially as tall as I am. Four squares down, three to go.

113 Rows In

The never-ending Maize and Blue Michigan blanket is my entire knitting life at the moment. This may be the reason I have not been doing as much knitting lately. I just finished row 113 of the M square. At row 112, the M split at the top and it was time to add two more balls of yarn to the intarsia pattern, for 5 total. I still have at least a quarter of the square left to go and this blanket is already taller than my nine-year-old.

To make things interesting in this sea of stockinette, I have decided to learn how to knit backwards. Knitting backwards replaces purling, which I'm not that fond of doing. It involves, get this, knitting in the opposite direction than you knit when knitting the normal way. When knitting, I move from right to left and the yarn wraps around the right needle, which is placed behind of left needle, like this:

When knitting backwards, I move from left to right and the yarn wraps around the left needle, which is placed behind of right needle, like this:

I'm still new at it, so it's slow-going. I figure if I spend the rest of this blanket knitting backwards instead of purling, I'll get pretty fast at it when I'm done. There's still a long way to go, but the intarsia is almost behind me, and that, that is cause for celebration.

Intarsia Purgatory

I have officially failed to finish my brother's U of M blanket in time for his late July birthday. I was already resigned to it. I pretty well knew it wasn't going to happen and I have revised the deadline for its completion to "before Christmas," which I'm confident I can manage, especially since this new rectangle I'm working on will be the last of the intarsia.

I've never been a fan of intarsia. It's cumbersome and tedious. Still, I have to admit that this blanket will look really good once it's finally finished, due in no small part to the intarsia. I'm sick of it though, the long droll length of stockinette when I really don't enjoy purling nearly as much as knitting, the seven odd balls of yarn all trailing off the work and tangling together. It's doom.

I'm on the rectangle that contains the big yellow "M" that is the U of M mainstay, reconfigured but based on the same chart I used for the Go Blue Bro Beanie. It started at the bottom and I'm slowly working my way to the two top points. The original seven odd balls have dropped down to three (two blue and one yellow) for a lengthy segment that will be the middle body part of the M. Near the end, I'll need to add another yellow and a blue (for a total of 5 balls), before it tapers off to one ball of blue and ends.

Then there will be just three rectangles to go, two in garter stitch (I can't wait!) and one in a cornstalk-inspired lace pattern. After that, there will likely have to be some sort of border. When this blanket is done, I will do a mighty jig. And I will never make another one as long as I live, so don't ask.

Are you ready for some football (made of yarn)?

Just as promised, I worked diligently on my football afghan rectangular square over my week-long staycation. As you may remember, this is the fourth rectangle in the Maize and Blue Stained Glass Blanket that I'm designing/knitting for my little brother in hopes of finishing it for his 26th birthday in July. By day two, I was far enough along on it to add the two extra balls for the laces at the top of the football.

Not much else of consequence got accomplished during the vacay. No real progress on the house, other than some minor cabinetry demolition that resulted in the death of the second stove's cooktop. (At least it was the old, less-nice stove.) I have a few writing ideas floating around in my head, solidifying. I made some headway on the starting the new novel front. I finished reading a couple of books, but really, I was just happy to sit around and not be working.

Of course, where there's sitting, there is inevitably knitting, so at least I did keep my promise to finish the football. Buy the pattern chart on ravelry.

Finally. Now, to start on the square of the Michigan "M" in none other than maize and blue. One month and two days to go. Think I can finish another four or five rectangles by then?

Yeah, I'm skeptical too.

On Traffic and Increased Knitting Time

Here in my adopted city of Cleveland, they are filming the second Captain America movie. You might have heard of it or about it. I know I have and not because I've been hanging at film locations for glimpses of starlets or even watching the local morning news. No. Rather, because of just how much the filming of this movie has impacted my work commute.

For some crazed reason, the city decided that it would be completely okay to allow the production company to close a major highway (and one of the few bridges used to get into the downtown area across the Cuyahoga River), known as the Shoreway, for two weeks. As a result, alternate routes had to take on the something like 37,000 vehicles that daily make their way into and out of town using the Shoreway. What that means for me is this: my normally 30 to 45 minute commute into town has changed into a 55 minute (if I leave by 6 in the morning) to an almost hour and a half drive through clogged, near-stand-still lanes on Interstate 90. FOR HALF A MONTH.

After a week of this stop-and-go madness, I made a choice. I decided to give myself a birthday present in the form of an early weeklong vacation. That's right. Starting next monday, which is my birthday incidently, I am taking a week's PTO time and having a staycation. We weren't going to do a big vacation this year anyway, what with all the necessary house renovations, so this just seemed like the next best thing. By the time I return to the interstate the week after next, the Shoreway should be back open and the traffic patterns, more or less, back to normal.

What that means: more knitting time. Oh sure, of course I'll also write and work on the house, getting carpets torn up and walls washed, and we might decide on a daytrip or two, but the real prize is the knitting.

 I'm halfway through the football square of the Maize and Blue Stained Glass Afghan for my brother. This blanket has an impending but flexible late July deadline that I probably won't make, as you may recall if you are one of my eleven subscribed readers.

By now, it's clear that there is a football there. It's snail's pace intarsia process has nearly been the death of this blanket on several occasions. I had to stop work on it yet again when I realized/remembered that it needed separate little balls for each different section of color.

A long time and numerous math calculations later, I had the required seven balls in use right now, three of which are full skeins, with an additional two that will need added on before the football is done for the lacing at the top.

(It's sitting on the hand-me-down couch we got from my brother, humorously enough.)

It's a bit like trying to find your way through a maze. Working a row goes something like this: Start row with white, find which brown ball goes next, cross with previous white ball, knit with brown ball, find which white ball goes next, cross with previous brown ball, knit, and repeat process, concluding with white. All the while, I've been praying to the powers-that-be to not have any of these many many balls tangle on me. So far I've been mostly successful. *Knock on wood.*

Here's to staycations, knitting, and movie traffic... And here's hoping that my next knitting post will include pictures of a completed football square.

Progress and Completion

There I was, frantically working on the Mason Dixon Knitting dishcloth cotton Baby Kimono for its Wednesday completion date while traveling to visit family over the long weekend, when it happened. Yes, though I had packed not only the kimono but my brothers ginormous, seemingly doomed Maize and Blue Stained Glass Blanket, with its many skeins of yarn, just in case I finished the kimono ahead of schedule, I forgot to pack the as-yet unused ball of Peaches and Cream yarn I needed for the kimono.

Thus, upon finishing the first front, I had to disengage and hope that I would have enough time when I got home on Labor Day night. Instead, perhaps partially out of guilt, I took up my brother's seemingly doomed blanket and tried to figure out whether or not what I had knit on the new square thus far was salvageable.

What do you know? It was. All the problems I saw with it when last I worked on it just weren't there anymore, so I have to chalk them up as wild hallucinations brought on by blanket fatigue. With the problems no longer an issue, I spent a good chunk of Monday banging out rows on the blanket, until, that is, I realized that I forgot to bring the extra skein of white I need to start on the white-colored interior detail of the football I'm intarsia-ing for this particular square. There I was, Monday afternoon on a four-day vacation week with absolutely no viable knitting to do. I could blame only myself.

Here it is, the bottom brown-only portion of the football, right before the white striping and laces come into play.

Either that or I have a very large mustache.

Back at home after an hour and a half drive, I got to work on the second sleeve/front of the kimono from Monday into Tuesday, finishing it up for a quick soak, block, and sun-drying on the back porch by around 3 p.m. By 6 p.m., I started in on the seaming, pausing to play a game of Scrabble before the kid's bedtime, and sewed on the buttons just shy of 9:30 p.m., having searched for and found the perfect shade and size of brown buttons in a mason jar of assorted buttons I purchased at a consignment shop last summer.

It turned out just as Mason Dixon Knitting predicted it would: quick, cute, and practical, despite the fact that before I seamed it up, it looked like this:

Mom-to-be seemed to like it and I hope baby feels likewise. I figure, since the baby will be born in the summer, a nice light cotton jacket will help keep him warm on chilly summer nights.

I even made my deadline, even with the additonal knitting done to my brother's blanket, though I did learn a valuable lesson: In a vacation situation, you can never bring too much yarn.

Ravelry Conundrum

I started making progress on the first intarsia square of the maize and blue stained glass blanket, promised at Christmas to my brother, in hopes of my completing it by his birthday in July. I really did. I made serious progress. Many, many rows were knit. And they still are knit, but the tension isn't quite right in places and I didn't put the yarn into bobbins so now its getting tangled all the time. I might need to rip it out and start over. I'm starting to doubt the feasibility of a July completion date.

On top of that, I have an impending baby shower at the end of May. Do I dare to consider making a wee hat or some wee mittens for the little one? Can I spare the time from the blanket? I know I shouldn't. However, apparently the knitter in me does not agree and has already purchased some cotton yarn with which to make a shower gift for a baby boy.

I'm thinking it could be either the Tea Cozy Elf Hat or the Mazon Dixon Knitting dish cloth cotton Baby Kimono. For the hat to have its full impact, though, it would require that the mommy understands that Dobby the house elf wore a tea cozy for a hat. Thus, if she is not a fan of Harry Potter, she might not get the reference, and I'm not sure she is into the Wizarding World in all its glory. Subsequently, I'm leaning towards the baby kimono, which I've heard from many corners is a great baby gift knit. Plus, the yarn I bought is dish cloth cotton.

Of course, when I purchased my new yarn for this special occasion, it hit me. Despite my best efforts to get my knitterly life organized and tabulated on ravelry, I never seem to keep up with it. As a result, my ravelry  queue is again horribly out-of-date, my stash has grown larger than my ravelry stash listings, and I have no idea which of my knitting books is added to my library and which aren't. The idea of having ravelry features to organize your stuff is genius, but the functionality of all those features gets a bit cloudy in practice. Who can remember to add a listing every time they buy a new knitting book or skein of yarn? Maybe some can, but I am not that girl.

No, I am not. In an atttempt to be that girl, I have faithfully listed to all of the organized knitter podcasts, but none of it has sunk in yet. I'm not sure it ever will.

There's a Fox in the Etsy Shop

If you haven't heard, trouble has arrived for a number of unsuspecting sellers on Etsy. The reason for this trouble has beginnings that span a decade into the past, when a crappy network decided to cancel one of the best shows on television after less than half the length of a normal season and after airing the few episodes they did air in the wrong gorram order.

Despite the network's lack of decency, the fans of this show, self-proclaimed as Browncoats, kept the series alive, fought for it so long and so hard that it lived on to become the only canceled series ever to be turned into a movie. And that movie did very very well, which the network took full advantage of, seeing as they still owned the rights to this show that they neglected and cast down without ever giving it a real chance.

That show was Firefly and the network was Fox.

For a decade, Browncoats everywhere have been crafting merchandise inspired by Firefly, because they sure as heck didn't get a lot of merchandise options from the network who abandoned their show. Now, as of last week, Fox has found an entirely new way of sticking it to Firefly fans. You see, Fox has belatedly decided to cash in on the fanbase by selling so-called Jayne hats through Thinkgeek (who are now donating all proceeds to a Browncoat charity that benfits equality because of Fox's misdeeds).

As you well know if you are a fan of the whedonverse and Firefly in particualr, in the episode "The Message" (which was one of the 3 episodes of the show Fox didn't even air before they cancelled it), Jayne Cobb opens a package from his mother in which is a rather loud orange and yellow earflap hat that his mother made for him. He proceeds to wear said hat through the rest of the episode, while various other characters make digs at his ugly headgear. The Jayne hat is much-beloved by fans, especially those of the knitting persuasion (like myself). Many sellers on etsy sell their own versions of the Jayne hat, made by their own hands and have for years without the interference of Fox. Until now.

Now, all of those etsy sellers selling the Jayne hat and any other Firefly-related or inspired merchandise found there stores shut down due to copyright/trademark violation, even if they did not mention Firefly or Jayne in the tags or name of the product, even if they only used a quotation from the movie as the moniker for a self-invented product that otherwise has nothing to do with Fox whatsoever. We are taking single mothers/fathers and little old ladies and self-employed business owners who rely on their Etsy shop as their sole source of income. And Fox and Etsy shut them down without so much as a word of warning or a fair shake.

I will be making a Jayne hat, when I'm not immersed in my brothers giant blanet of doom (aka the Maize and Blue Stained Glass Blanket), in protest and I encourage all my knitting compatriots, whether Browncoat or never-watched-that-show-in-my-life, to do likewise or, better yet, to find one of these closed etsy sellers and purchase a Jayne hat from them. We proles need to stick together when the giant evil corporation comes along and ruins everything. Again.

Creation of a Colorwork Chart

In our family, there is nothing so sacred as the yearly season of U of M college football, particularly the lately dreaded Michigan/Ohio State season-ending rivalry game. Some people have Super Bowl parties, but not us. Most of us couldn't give a fig about the pros at all, but man, do we have us a wild Wolverine/Buckeye shindig. Not basketball. Not hockey. Not baseball. It's about football. Thus, the next rectangle in my brother's Michigan log cabin afghan, the Maize and Blue Stained Glass Blanket, is to be a football, and not any football. I planned a great feat of intarsia glory that intersperses the brown and the white in a realistic but decidedly stained glass look. Of course, a chart for this doesn't exist in the world already, so I had to create it myself.

To do this, I employed the tools at my disposal: a graphing calculator I purchased in eleventh grade and MS excel. This is not the first time I have gone this route to satiate my family's undying love of a football team for which not a lot of colorwork charts exist. When creating the Wolverine-in-Training helmet, which utilizes the winged football helmet design of the U of M team, I had to do a similar operation, so I am fairly confident the results will please me.

To start, I used the yarn in question to create a gage swatch in stockinette stitch. To avoid using up the blue, yellow, white, black, and brown colorways I so desperately needed to make up the blanket, I cheated and used a different colorway (called either Hot Red or Red Hot) of the same yarn brand and type that I can lying around (It's red heart super saver, so sue me). Then, I measured 4 inches horizontally and vertically and divided those measurements by four to get the stitches per inch, 4 stitches to the inch width-wise and 6 stitches to the inch length-wise. From there, I did the math to get how big one stitch for length and width, and I created an excel spreadsheet whose coordinate grid was made up of rectangles set to those measurements.

Now, I assume there is probably an easier way to do this, but if there is, I am unaware of it. Thus, I free-handed a football on that spreadsheet using brown and white coloring that was as long and as wide, stitch-wise, as I needed the rectangle on the blanket to be. This process took several days and utilized measurement comparisons from a football I sketched in the blanket blueprint I drew up in December.

By the time I finished all this craziness, I had the blanket ready to cast on the for football rectangle. I reblocked it, let it dry, and weaved in the accumulated ends. Then, I did the math for how many stitches to cast on for each rectange edge along the right-hand side of the blanket and cast them out in black. Since then, I have not touched the blanket in favor of more important, time-sensitive things, but I'm hoping all the prep work and the math pay off. I'm really hoping not to have to frog anything for this portion of the blanket.

I'll keep you posted.

Swatch avoidance and the third mother bear

Almost every knitting guidebook in existence tells of the importance of the swatch, that it will save heartache, that it will ensure a good fit to that future sweater, etc. etc., but I'll tell you something: I hate swatching. Just hate it. I hate it to the point that I will avoid swatching until I no longer want to make whatever it was I needed the swatch for in the first place, which, of course, means that I no longer have to swatch anymore. See how that works?

Because the blanket I'm making is also a pattern I'm developing as I go, I figured I'd avoided the need for a swatch once again. However, this was not to be. You see, after completing the first corn-inspired square of the Maize and Blue Stained Glass Blanket, I knew that it was too squat. I tried to justify the okayness of its wide rectangularity, but alas, deep within, I knew it would never be okay. Sighing, I unpicked the cast-off and completed two and a half more repeats of the pattern, resulting in a squarish rectangle that seemed much more up to snuff.

Then, I picked up stitches on the right-hand side of the rectangle, one for each row I knit up and I started on in garter stitch. Soon, it became apparent that something was very wrong. The two square was much wider that the first square was long, and the stitched spilled over on both ends of the first square. Obviously, this many stitches was too many, and I realized, with chagrin, that I would have to swatch. Then, I frogged the second square and put the first square, along with yarn and needles, in its project bag and read a book instead.

This behavior continued for many days, until I knew i had to end the procrastination. I had promised this blanket's completion and complete it, I will. With determination, I took out the yarn and needles and swatched a wide, short swatch. The height of the stitches didn't matter, as I could just cast off when I had reached the length specified in my sketched blanket blueprint, but I made sure to make the swatch much larger than the 4 inches necessary to measure gage. As it turns out, according to the swatch, I need to pick up 7/10ths of the number of stitches I originally picked up. I have since made a plan for how to best place this picked up stitches and I will begin again this weekend, having quite learned my lesson though I'm sure it's a lesson I'll learn again soon enough.

In crochet news, I have completed my third mother bear. His legs are shortish, though not as short as Stubby's legs. I had a lot more fun with this little bear's facial expression than I had with the first two and I'm fairly in love with him. I've named him Mark, in memory of my good friend Jolynn's younger brother. I want to make at least a fourth bear before I send Mark and his two siblings off to the mother bear project homebase, but with all the work left to do on the blanket, I'm not sure it will happen. I might end up sending off these three and then taking a break on the bears until my brother has his blanket in hand. We'll see.

Also, happy belated Valentine's Day.

Blankets Galore

When my grandmother-in-law passed away last year, she left behind the beginning of a crocheted afghan and two skeins of green yarn, Bernat Vintage in the Fern colorway, with which to complete it. As the first of the skeins was already being used in the afghan, I assumed that the blanket up to that point was created using the start of that skein. With that in mind, I figured out the stitch pattern and started in where she left off.

When I reached the end of the first skein, I realized that what was left would only create the same length and width of fabric to match what I had just created, and that I wanted a blanket larger than twice the size already completed. In my stash, I found a skein of dark green and a skein of white that were also Bernat Vintage. Both colors worked well with the lighter green color, so I figured out a configuration that would use up these partial skeins and still look symmetrical as a blanket. I did a thin stripe of white, a thicker stripe of dark green, and another thin stripe of white. Finishing that, I took up with the Fern colorway again and figured on finishing off the skein to finish the blanket with a stripe of the lighter green to match the size of the first section of the blanket.

I crocheted on, hoping to finish before the end of Christmas break. I was sitting in my mother-in-law's dining room, crocheting away when I reached the end of the last skein but with significantly less repeats of the stitch pattern than the first light green section, and it hit me: there had been another partial skein she used at the start of that first section. I didn't have enough yarn now to finish the blanket.

I eyed back over the remnants of the last skein and noticed a price sticker from Meijer. I decided to take a shot at finding another skein, hoping against hope that they had not discontinued the colorway. My husband rushed me to the local Meijer, where, fortunately, they had copious skeins of Fern. I bought one and finished the Multigenerational Blanket without additional heartache. It became an extra Christmas present for my husband (slightly belated) and now resides in our combination blanket chest and coffee table in the apartment. I think we did a pretty nice job, all considered.

The next blanket on the agenda will be my brother's Christmas present, what I have deemed the Maize and Blue Stained Glass Afghan. I purchased all necessary yarn and, to make it feel more manly, I "wrapped" it inside a manufacturing bag I gained at an expo in Chicago. Becuase yarn is a less-than-thrilling present for a non-fiber-enthusiast, I decided to make a sketch of what the final blanket will look like. I pulled an old sketchbook out of the desk cabinent and opened it up, ready to find the next blank page and realized it was a sketchbook used for one of my undergraduate drawing classes, circa 2003. I how it was 2003 because there are sketches of baby bottles, a safety seat, and my son when he was a newborn. Talk about a flashback.

I managed to finish the sketch of the blanket, a log cabin style with intarsia and assorted mono-colored rectangles that vary slightly in stitch patterns. At this point, I'm thinking a mix of garter and a lace pattern I found called Corn Stalks (maize, get it?). The family seemed to like the look of the blanket and I think sketching out the idea really helped to solidify it in my mind. I plan on getting started within the week.

Despite how much my brother has been wanting such a blanket, I went back and forth about making it. I have an ever increasing list of projects I want to tackle and really wanted to do one for myself. However, I'm more of a gift knitter, so the blanket won. To make me feel like selfish knitting is on the horizon, I updated my ravelry queue with some of the projects I want to knit with the yarn from my stash I want to use for them earmarked for those projects.

In the meantime, I'll work on the blanket slowly and start in on the Cogknitive Podcast's mother bear KAL/CAL. For the months of January and February, the KAL/CAL participants, including me, will work like mad to make bears for the Mother Bear Project. I have two bear feet crocheted so far. Wish me luck.