wool blanket – Ali Does It Herself

Happy Leap Day!

As I said last week, I’m working on two blankets for two weddings this summer. This one is for my eldest brother Krystopf and Atlas, his wife-to-be. Depending on how you look at it, it’s going to be both easier and more of a challenge than the one I’m making for Doodle. Easier, because it just involves knitting, and more of a challenge because I really hate/suck at knitting.

But there you go.

I bought these beautiful hand-dyed, Canadian-made wools at A Good Yarn downtown. I had jewel tones in mind for this blanket (Atlas likes purple and blue), and Tanis Fiber Arts had exactly what I was looking for. They’re just gorgeous, and totally worth the price.

Now, those are skeins, which means that I had to wind them all into balls before I could start knitting. There is an art to winding wool by hand, but I haven’t yet perfected it. Mostly I swear a lot as I constantly drop my misshapen ball-in-progress and it goes skittering off across the floor. Anyway, these ones aren’t bad.

When you’re knitting with balls of wool, it helps to put the ball in a bowl while you knit. This keeps it in one place, and not rolling all over the place and getting tangled. You can even get special bowls designed for knitting, but I haven’t yet reached the apex of ability that means I deserve such a thing.

I know my limitations when it comes to knitting, so I’m keeping this as simple as possible, and hoping that the simplicity ends up equalling elegance when I’m through. So I’ve got four colours, and I’m just doing two columns of alternating colours. This one is green and turquoise, and the other one will be purple and navy. Then I will stitch the columns together to form the blanket. (FYI, those panels are each 30 stitches long and about 36 rows tall.)

And I will offset my knit sides and purled sides so that it forms a patchwork when I’m done.

I will of course need to figure out something to do around the edges. I’m open to easy suggestions (please no i-cord or anything like that).

But that’s what I got so far!

Here’s a great gift idea for avid picnic-ers that you know. This was a Christmas gift for Doodle and her man.

I found a brand-new Scouts Canada campfire blanket at Value Village in the fall, and I immediately thought of Doodle, who, although she has lived in the United States for several years now, is a staunch Canadian, and, like my brother Ando, who is also an ex-pat Canuck, likes to surround herself with various items of Canadiana.

Normally the little Scouts cut holes in the centres of the blankets to wear them like ponchos, and often sew badges and other things onto the blanket itself. Then they sit around the campfire and tell dirty stories.

I’m not sure exactly what the blanket is made of, but I hope it’s flame-retardant.

Anyway, I purchased a measure of bright red vinyl to match the red thread on the blanket itself, and cut it to fit. Because the blanket wasn’t an exact rectangle, I made a little mark on the vinyl to indicate where the Scouts Canada logo should go.

I used pinking shears to finish the edges of the vinyl. Then I cut buttonholes at all the corners and along the sides. I reinforced the buttonholes with red thread in a blanket stitch.