Hot off the knitting needle

Ever since I knitted my first baby blanket, the itch to knit has been slowly coming back to me. To harness that urge, I decided to dig up some more old stash yarn and knit it up in the most basic pattern that I could find that wasn’t just rib stitch.
And that’s how I stumbled on the Sliding is Fun blanket by srossinifaust. Well, it IS actually a rib stitch blanket, in the sense that each and every single stitch is just plain knit stitch, but because you’re working with two colours and take advantage of cable needles to slide your work every other row to the other, you get the result of a stockinette stitch without having to purl a single stitch!

I started with white yarn and cast on 96 stitches on 5 mm needles (US 8). I knit until my skein of variegated yarn was completely used up and then did a last repeat in white. The result was a small squarisch blanket of 58 over 60 cm. But I still had one skein of white left over, which I wanted to use up as well.

So I used that final skein to crochet a border around the blanket. It took some trial and error to find a stitch that could make a border without running out of yarn halfway through.
Eventually I crocheted 3 rounds with a 6mm (J) hook, starting with plain (US) single crochet, followed by two rounds of moss stitch (alternating (US) single crochet and chain 1). This used up my entire left over skein, with only 5 grams to spare!

I also tried to block the blanket, trying to make it larger. I didn’t have any high hopes, since I used acrylic yarn and that doesn’t really respond to wet blocking, and neither did it for this blanket. The eventual measurements are 63 over 68 cm, which is ideal for a lapghan to use during working hours!

The blanket turned out so soft and it’s also pretty warm! It will certainly come in handy when I turn the heating down this winter!

Also, I can’t decide which side I like best: the one with the white foreground or with the colours as a foreground. I kind of like both, so I have like two blankets for the price of one!

And what about that knitting itch? Well, I still have it, so you can hopefully expect to more knitting blogs in the near future!

Cheers,
Charlotte