FO: The Green Blanket

At long last, I finished the green blanket yesterday (also my birthday). After teaching myself to knit 10 years ago, I bought a small book and the first skeins of yarn for this and several other blankets (the others were for my kids and were completed long ago). This blanket, however, isn't just a blanket: it's a story of 10 years of my life and the progression of my knitting skills and knowledge.

When I first bought the yarn for this blanket, I felt guilty for spending the money, even though RedHeart has always been fairly inexpensive. I originally bought six skeins for my green blanket; two shades of green and one shade of tan; my thinking was that each skein would make a stripe. I was going through a divorce when I cast on for it. Somehow I always felt comforted when I worked on it, no matter how difficult things were. It's been in actual use ever since I got enough of it put together to lay across my lap for a cat to lay on:

This was taken in July of 2008, when there were still only three colors

I also learned a lot about knitting during this project. For instance, when I sewed the first few pieces together, I had no idea how much they would draw up; the piece was much shorter than I expected, so I had to add rows. At the time, I had no idea that you could unbind the bound-off stitches. Thanks to knitting button bands for sweaters, however, I had learned to pick up and knit, so that's what I did. You can just see the odd-shaped stripe in the middle sections:

Here we see the importance of learning to un-do…

When I finally got the stripes long enough, I realized the six stripes I would be able to make from my original six skeins would not be wide enough, so I added more green and a green-brown multi to lighten things up a bit. While I was knitting with the multi, I learned that multi-colored yarns are not as thick as solid-colored yarns. I still needed to add some width to the blanket, but I didn't want to use more of the multi-color, nor more of the tan since it looked kind of drab, so I decided to go with more green and a darker brown:

Here we learn the importance of dye lots…

This was taken in December of 2010; blanket is bigger and with more colors, but still holds cats just fine

By the time I bought the last batch of yarn for this thing, I was married to my darling Hubby, who scoffed at the notion that knitting was a selfish or wasteful hobby, bought me yarn instead of flowers after an argument, a knitting machine (Vera) so I could churn out big stuff quickly, and who has accompanied me many times to our LYS to watch me ooh and ahh over the yarns. So now, 10 years after starting this blanket (5 of which we have been together), he and I get to share it for many years to come:

Boo-yah; we win.