Friday, November 6, 2009

Answers to Questions on Swirl Baby Blanket

1. Quantity of yarn - I used one skein of light and one skein of dark pink for the blanket, plus a good chunk of a third skein for the edging. Five skeins would make two blankets. Not much yarn for a generously sized baby blanket. (Yarn goes farther when you knit. I remember when I had the yarn shop and we were crocheting afghans, a number of our decent sized crocheted afghans took 3 pounds of yarn!)

2. The blue blanket in worsted was 50 stitches at the wide end for each triangle. The pink, sport weight one, 60 stitches at the wide end for each triangle. I've been thinking about doing a fingering weight scrappy blanket on the standard machine, and I will need more stitches for that thinner stuff.

3. When I describe picking up the second triangle, yes, one needle is empty and pick up one bar on each of the other 59 needles. What I was trying to say there (and not succeeding) is that all together, there are 60 needles. What matters the most is that you do each triangle with the same number of stitches and rows.

4. You could certainly have a nice circle with 9 triangles. However, that won't let you alternate 2 colors. It might be nifty with 3 colors, though.

5. Most round baby blankets seem to be short-row jobs. On this project, I actually may have come up with something we haven't seen before, but machine knitting's been around a long time with a lot of talented people coming up with ideas all the time. When I had the idea, poor John couldn't even get me to talk to him. I had to knit it RIGHT NOW and see how it worked out.

More swirl ideas have been hatching all this week, and Saturday I will have a chance to try some of them out.

2 comments:

  1. Hi Diana,

    You're quite right about techniques having been around for a long time. In the late 90's I used this same technique for a tree skirt, I just left the back open instead of stitching that last one together so I could wrap it around the tree trunk. I too was all excited about having "thought up something new", but was quickly shown how some shawls were knit using the same idea. Oh well... it's still wonderful and it's great that you put it up on video so other's can see how it's done. Good Job!

    ReplyDelete
  2. There's lot of sew-as-you-go in Charlene Shafer's books. I especially like it for the baby things. Heck, we used to pick up the back of a sweater as we knitted the front.

    I wanted to get a twist to the sections of the circle, without it being too much work. We've all done pie shapes.

    Diana

    ReplyDelete