Tuesday 11 December 2012

The next blanket


The next standard blanket, #152, is another white, knitted in aran weight.











The main yarn is this yellow that I got very cheaply in a charity shop.  It is Greenock double knitting, manufactured in Scotland.  It comes in one ounce balls, so I would assume that it is from the 1960s.  It still feels fine though, and it is very nice to knit with.  There were 21 balls, so it is enough for several blankets.  It is interesting to see how the yellow colour disappears when it is mixed with other yarns.  The white - that used to annoy me - disappears too, so now I have fewer reservations about using it and I am getting accustomed to the idea that there will always be some.

There is also some pink mohair and this Jaeger angora wool blend in pink.  I love the picture of the rabbit on the label.  When I bought the Patons random coloured yarn I told myself that I had to use it in a blanket despite the fact that I would dislike the dark brown portions, so here it is.  I am also using up bits of thin cashmere yarn.  The cashmere gives such a nice soft feeling to a blanket although you can't see it, so I would like to continue using it.  I don't know what to do - it takes time to unravel such thin yarn and one blanket takes a full medium sized sweater, so it would be one sweater per blanket.  It is still possible to find reasonably priced cashmere in charity shops, even sweaters that haven't shrunk in washing.

I unravelled the Kaffe Fassett Outlined Star jacket that I bought a year ago.  I decided this as part of my effort to use the white yarn, but on the whole I think it is a good idea.  There didn't seem to be very much yarn there once it had been unravelled, and the unravelling was easy.  It is more difficult to separate three strands of wool when you come to using it.  The yarn is lovely of course.




The second garment was this fairisle cardigan in blue turquoise purple shades.  The label said Woodward Davey and it is obviously hand knitted. I wondered if it was knitted with self striping yarn, but it was not.  It was shortish lengths of a number of yarns in similar shades.  It is very nice shetland wool, with blue mohair that has shrunk.  It took quite a while to unravel, but it was nice to work with.  I have seen a second cardigan with the same label in a more traditional fair isle pattern, but I didn't buy it.  (You can now find links to them on Google.)