Sunday 22 April 2012

The next blanket

My guidelines for choosing yarn for blanket #147 were simple - medium colours and no reds.  This blanket is knitted in double knitting weight and I enjoy knitting with smaller needles.  For want of red it became blue and green as well as my favourite neutral beige grey brown shades.






I added some yarns that I had rejected for the previous blanket #146 as too dark.












And some bright blue and greens.  I keep saying that I don't like these because it is so difficult to avoid them spoiling the look.  From now on I would like to reserve them for the dark blankets, if I can only remember.










For softness I added these.  The grey on the left is from a charity shop.  I bought some five balls without labels.  I like to think that they are mohair.  There may be some acrylic content, but they smell animal.  The next is the angora yarn from blanket #138, and the blue is a Pingoiun yarn, d'Esprit Angora.  It feels like angora, but the label buried deep inside says that it is only 10% angora, the rest acrylic and nylon.




The two garments that I unpicked were also soft.

The first is a Peruvian Connection picture sweater.  This was lovely, and such a work that has gone into knitting it.  It was so difficult to unravel, though.  The ends, and there were thousands of ends, had not been woven in, but sewn in, into themselves two or three times.  I wondered why I wanted to unpick it.  The only way to cope was to forget about time, and take it slowly getting into the rhythm of unpicking.  The yarn is alpaca, 4 ply, knitted double, and the sweater yielded lots of nice wool in lovely colours, all in different lengths, some even very long.  I am pleased with the yarn.  It will last a long time.














The second is an M&S cashmere cardigan, tied with a silk sash.  The colour is a nice light brown and the yarn very soft.  I have included in on every row, and I like the sheen the colour adds as well as the softness.  I am pleased that there will be enough to do the whole blanket.