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.

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.

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.