So here it is, the blanket wot i knit.
I started off, when at a loose end, with some purple wool and slightly bent knitting needles given to me by my Gran. After scoffing at me for being left handed, for the umpteenth time in my life, she eventually agreed to showing me how to cast on properly. Apparently you don’t just wrap the wool around one needle and then tie a knot. Effort has to go into it, although admittedly, not that much. Anyway, I managed to cast on about 25 stitches without too much problem and then, I started to knit.
Now, at this point, I had never been introduced to the concept of there being named methods of knitting. I knew that you could do twiddly bits and there was the twisty bits Gran did in the Arran Sweaters of Yesteryears. But otherwise, whenever I had taken up the needles in the past, I just knitted. same stitch, both sides, ad infinitum. This being my past experience, the first few squares are just (what I call) plain old knitting. Some were more succesful than others, but it passed the time and it gave me something to do before I started my new job.
Time passed, and I cracked open the internet and found inspiration and started trying other stitches. I was a whirl of knit-one-purl-one (a.k.a. moss stitch), twisty bits (cable), plain-and-fancy (knit one side, purl the other. still no idea what that should be called) and seed stitch (is that the knit-one-purl-one? is moss stitch different?). I loved it. I loved it so much that at some points, episodes of Extreme Makeover: Home Edition permitting, I would knit one or even two squares a day.
I started getting better just in time to start at my new job. I was still on the road to addiction though. Every time I went into town to the shops, I ended up buying something to feed the knitting monster. A ball of wool here, a special bag to put the rapidly growing number of squares there. I even invested in two, yes two, different cable needles. I wasn’t knitting quite so much these days, but look! I had all the gear, so I was a knitter now. Well done me.
Eventually, about six months after I started, I had finished knitting squares. I had somewhere in the region of 70 squares of a very similar size. I went for a purple theme – the same bright purple wool from my gran that managed to turn into a suprisingly large number of squares, a darker purple that didn’t quite match but was lovely anyway, then a cream wool, an arran type wool that had darker flecks in it (see picture above. ooh, lovely cabling) and then wool the same colour as those flecks. It was lovely. I loved pulling all the squares out, with the different patterns and colours and laying them out and forcing my husband or parents to look at them. And that’s where I stopped.
For a while anyway. After a short break, I took all the squares out of the special knitting bag and laid them out on the spare bed. Cor blimey, I thought, look at all that knitting. Well done me.
knittysewandsew 