Current WIP blankets!
I’ve been doing a lot of blanket-making in quarantine. Before April 2020, I had made a single blanket in my entire knitting/crocheting career. In 2020, I made four blankets and started five others!!! I have a friend giving me a lot of grief (in a loving way) about how many unfinished blankets I have laying around, and I took some photos to show them, and decided to turn it into a whole post because I never post anything original here. I’ll have to do a post about the ones I finished last year soon, too, because I’m really proud of them!
(Please don’t mind the mess of yarn on my floor; I was in the middle of reorganizing some of it when I took these photos. Also, my room is generally messy, don’t judge me.)
Ten-stitch blanket
The only knit blanket I’m working on right now! I’m about three cakes into this blanket, and am consistently surprised by how big it is every time I pull it out, because I don’t know when the last time I worked on it was (oops). I’m using Caron Chunky Cakes in Rainbow Jellies!
Granny Stripes
This blanket is absolutely massive. It’s over 8 feet wide and being worked flat, since it’s granny stripes. I’m using Red Heart Super Saver Stripes in Retro Stripe. I have a total of 33 skeins (I think) for this blanket. I’m only getting about three inches out of each skein, if that, so I honestly hope that it’s enough to make the whole blanket!!! I’d love to do some matching throw pillows for it at some point, but we’ll see if I ever get around to that lol. First I have to finish the blanket, anyways.
Granny Rectangle
This is a Yarnspirations pattern for Caron Chunky Cakes yarn, although I fully intend to make the blanket larger than what the pattern calls for. Since this photo was taken, I’ve worked on the blanket, and it’s noticably bigger already! I’m aiming for it to be the next one I finish. I’m planning to use about 9 cakes in the end (unless the rectangle-ness of the pattern makes it an absurd size with that many) even though it only calls for 5, because I like giant blankets. I’m currently finishing up skein 4, and it’s getting to a very comfortable lapghan size! I’m using Caron Chunky Cakes in Sweet and Sour.
Corner-to-corner Scrap Blanket
This is the third scrap blanket I started in 2020 (the other two were Not-your-granny’s square blankets) and the second c2c. When I was trying to figure out how exactly to use scraps for a c2c, I decided to just collect all of the yarn I wanted to use for the blanket and sort it into two piles, putting balls/skeins of yarn that were about the same size into each pile. I also have a few pounds (one-pound skeins I was gifted during spring cleaning at work in 2019) of some less-than-gorgeous green yarn that worked really well with many of the other colors I had pulled for this blanket, so I’ve been doing single-row stripes of that between every other color I use. When bringing a different shade of green into the blanket, I’ve been doing a stripe of the tie-in green, a stripe of cream or purple that I also have an insane amount of, the new color of green, and then another row of cream/purple before the buffer row of green into the next color. (You can kind of see where I used the cream between the grean and the cream/green/teal variegated stripe, and purple before the final very dark green stripe at my working edge). The blanket is currently about 4.5 feet-ish wide? and I’m aiming to end up with a 6x6 foot square at the smallest, because that’s about the size I aim for for my own blankets and the friend I’m making this for is taller than me!!! My scrap yarn (which isn’t entirely scraps, but is also just some leftovers that I don’t know what else to do with and yarn for abandoned projects that got absorbed into this one) is actually going a lot further than I thought it would, so hopefully this turns into a giant, cozy blanket!!!
Granny Square Quilt
Confession time: I love Caron Chunky Cakes yarn. Sure, it has a lot (and I mean a LOT) of flaws, like a lack of consistent strand weight, differentiation in colors within the same dye lot, variation in color order in skeins, and the fact that there’s at least one break where the yarn has been knotted together in EVERY cake, but it’s soft, comes in pretty colors, and is fairly hardy. The first quarantine blanket I made was out of the Ballet Sorbet colorway, and I’ve slept with that every night for several months (with a break over the summer because of the heat!) and, while it’s a little fuzzy, it’s not in particularly bad shape. Also, I machine washed AND DRIED it and it held up amazingly, so I really can’t complain.
I’m using all my Chunky Cakes scraps from other blankets (plus the blues/turquoises, which were leftover from a blanket my mom made) to make a granny square quilt. I can get two of these squares (often with a tiny bit left over) from each color stripe in a cake, so I can get about 18-19 squares from a single cake. I have 74 made as of this picture (I’ve made a few others since, but not many) from the colorways Ballet Sorbet, Cherries Jubilee, Blue Moon, and Bumbleberry. I need somewhere between 144-290 squares for the blanket I want to make (144 for a 12x12 square quilt, but I’m aiming for a giant one that’s more like 15x18) so uhhh I’m not even close. But they look really pretty all sorted out!!!
What have y’all been making lately? What are some of your favorite projects/finished objects from 2020?