The blanket, she is done!

Apologies for the long absence, but I've taken on far more knitting projects than I think I can handle.

I also took a trip to the Hamptons on a bus full of yarnies and knitters and got to meet Kay Gardiner, half of the womanly brains behind the above blanket design, who you can read more about over at Mason Dixon Knitting.


Once I've processed all the projects I've taken on recently, I will be sure to blog about that trip, which was kind of amazing. I just haven't been in a blog writing mood, more of a frenzied knitter mood, so the typing of things has fallen by the wayside.

But back to that baby blanket...

It's done! I hand sewed the whole thing! But not until I got 3/4 of the way through, realized the fourth side wouldn't line up, started crying, ripped it back, traveled with it half-sewn to the baby shower so I could at least show it to the mommy-to-be, then brought it back home and started in on the torture again.

I'm not very good at hand sewing.


But I'm fairly proud of my fairly straight back stitch.

The most amazing thing about my yarn trip to the Hamptons was getting to talk to Kay about the blanket, and then having the quasi-humiliating experience of her reading my blog post about hating to weave in all those ends. She did the best thing a person could do for me, which was to tell me to get used to weaving in ends. It's part of the process, and I have to get used to it. And frankly, after my experience with hand sewing that piece of unforgiving fabric, I have to agree with her.

So with that in mind, I set about trying to come up with a design that would force me to weave in ends on every row. Because I am sadistic, and I have to teach myself a lesson. Now this design, I thought it was genius. And I thought I was a genius for coming up with it. I need you to stick with me here when I say that I've only been knitting for 3 years, and the things I find novel are pretty old hat to experienced knitters. But I'm a total Christopher Columbus - I think I've discovered something and get all puffy-headed and candy-notioned about it without realizing not only has it been discovered before, but it's been civilized.

I'm not going to say any more about it, because the experience deserves its own blog post. It was really character building, I'll tell you that. It didn't make me cry, but it definitely beat me up a little. So the next post will invite you in to my heart ache, and give you a recipe for a fairly simple Old Hat hat. And then perhaps the post after that will talk about my trip to the Hamptons. And the one after that, my trips to yarn stores in Mystic, Connecticut and Boston, Massachusetts. You know, in between participating in a Stephen West KAL, knitting a blanket for my Dad's birthday in September, and finishing a tank top that I'd like to wear in two weeks.

Basically, check back in a year.