a not-saccharine baby blanket

My youngest brother is expecting his first baby, and both he and his wife have made it clear they are not into cute-overload, saccharine baby things. I was talking this design constraint over with J-A, and happened to mention my brother is also heavily into NASA, especially the Apollo era. She came up with the idea of making a baby blanket with the NASA logo on it.

We grabbed our phones and found a few examples of the "space meatball" logo done in cross-stitch, but the only pattern for sale involved signing up for the vendor web site before you could even think about paying, and the credentials were, ah, intrusive and nosy. No, I am not going to tell you my life story just so I can buy one cross-stitch pattern.

So I made my own in a spreadsheet, did some math to figure out how to centre it on a metre square baby blanket, and had at it.

As you can see from the photo above, I did the logo's background in intarsia, but embroidered the white and red details over top. This was simply because the idea of knitting in those far-apart white "stars" did not seem like a good functional design decision. Originally I was going to do the embroidery in duplicate stitch, but that was coming out unevenly and making the fabric too stiff, so I took it all out and switched to cross-stitch.

I like cross-stitch on knitting. The stitches provide good coverage, but the fabric stays flexible because most of the embroidery yarn just sort of floats on top. The only thing to remember is that instead of the square stitches one usually gets, these stitches come out wider and shorter because knitting is wider than it is tall (5:7 ratio for plain stocking stitch as used here). My embroidery chart spreadsheet had to take that into account as well.

The border was 4 rows/stitches of built-in garter stitch (ie: knitted as one piece with the rest of the blanket). I like garter borders, but I have a bad habit of making them too narrow to prevent the edges from rolling/flipping. In this case I gave a blanket a quick stretch/block to settle down the flipping, and added a flannel backing.

The backing was necessary anyhow to cover up the embroidery floats on the back of the blanket, and while it hasn't tamed the edge flipping entirely, it has tamed it to such a large extent I don't think any more adjustments are required. Besides, if it's going to be a "NASA" item, shouldn't it be a little overengineered? 

This was the first time I'd backed any knitting with woven fabric, and it was much easier than I expected. I found a fabulous technical knitting blog which explained all the considerations very well. Everything from cutting to machine sewing the hem to hand-sewing the backing to the blanket took about half a day, and half of that was comfortably sitting on the couch watching TV while I did the hand-sewing part. I used doubled thread for strength, and matched the overcast stitches to the rows/stitches on the blanket — something you can do when your gauge is in the firmish range like mine tends to be.

The knitted part is all 100% acrylic yarn (yeah, I went there), of various brands. The logo itself is all in Red Heart, which is a little thicker than the Lion Brand Pound of Love I used for the main colour. This worked out well because it means that the logo is a little stiffer and "pops" slightly from the background.

The Lion Brand yarn was a great discovery (more advice taken from J-A). It's soft, and the Oxford Grey I used has enough colour depth people thought it was wool. I used a whole ball plus about 20% of another ball for the blanket, and never ran across a single knot — amazing for about a kilometre of yarn.

The finished blanket came out slightly larger than the square metre I had planned (and despite fussy gauge swatching — oh well). I couldn't get a good photo showing the whole thing, but here's an overhead shot from when I was blocking it for context:

211 stitches x 280 rows for 59,080 stitches in total, and all done on straight needles too. And who knows? Maybe the baby will take it to space when they grow up.

miscalculated

So there I was, finishing off the last couple dozen of motifs for the ogee blanket, and I decided to join a few motifs just to double-check measurements and confirm they were going to fit together. As one does.

And that's when I noticed that I had made some very wrong assumptions in calculating the number of motifs I'd need.

The first assumption was easy to mitigate. It turned out a vertical row of 11 motifs was closer to the measurement I wanted than the planned 12, especially if you included the border I was going to add. Okay, more arrangement options, less to join, what's not to love?

The second assumption, that's what. I'd figured an original blanket size of 12 motifs long by 12 motifs wide. And I'm not wrong, except that I treated the motifs as a square grid, not as what they are — a tessellation.

Look at that red-edged motif in the photo up top. See how it reaches the halfway point of the row to the left of it? Now imagine there were motifs to the right of it, where the table is. It, and the entire vertical row it belongs to, would span from halfway inside the row to the left to halfway inside the row to the right, adding virtually no width to the overall piece. The point of each ogee adds about a centimetre, not the 13 centimetres I'd planned.

That means I need nearly twice as many vertical rows as I thought to reach the actual width I wanted, which works out to... 12 more horizontal half-motifs and 94 whole motifs.

That's the bad news. The good news is I still have lots of yarn left over, even taking seam yarn and border yarn into account. It's just going to take a few weeks longer is all, and I'll have to be careful when placing motifs which are made from colours in short supply so they don't get clustered together.

Yeah. That's it. Really.

Sigh.

second afghan syndrome

Second Sock and Second Sleeve syndromes are well known in crafting — the idea that an item, if big enough, means that the second version of the same item will be boring and onerous to do. This is working reason behind why picture sweaters and mirror imaged socks were invented (and deliberately mismatched earrings, no doubt).

I have two nieces so I have had to work through Second Toy and now, Second Afghan Syndrome.

The photo above is of the first, finished mermaid afghan. I started it around the middle of December and finished it around the end of January. It's now the beginning of March, and the second one has been... languishing. I'm just at the point where the initial rows will be joined in the round. I'm hoping it will let me pick up the pace a little, because it's when things get joined in the round that the decreases start.

The original pattern calls for the opening slit (not shown) to be almost all the way to the bottom of the afghan, and for the decreases to be both abrupt and late. The afghan is to go from full width (25 shells) to something like 4 shells in about the minimum number of rounds it is possible to do that in gracefully.

The end effect is much like a nineteenth-century reticule purse, and although there are plenty of crocheters on-line who reported they liked this way of ending, I didn't. I joined the work into the round after only about 45cm, and decreased gradually until the body of the afghan was just wide enough to accommodate the tail (16 shells). The tail closes off the bottom by being slip-stitched directly onto the bottom of the body, working from the inside so no seams were on the outside.

Today after work I marked each decrease in the finished afghan with a safety pin (take notes? what do you mean, take notes?), so I'd know when to make the same decreases in the second afghan. With preparation comes effiency and all that good stuff.