Baby Blanket

It's spring break!  yay!  And happy Easter to all.

This year on my spring break I've determined that I need to do some projects, for my own sanity and pleasure.  I've been working on my new school bag as detailed below, cutting the strips of various fabrics for the patch work portions of the bag.  It's going to be gorgeous and I can't wait to see it finished and to use it.  I also plan to do some wall projects, using both drawing and fabric, for my house and for my friend Emilie's new office.

I promised photos of the baby blanket I completed for my own future child, so here they are:

Notice that I did not use "classic" baby colors.  I despise pastels.  Even though I used a gradient that includes blue, I feel that this blanket is unisex because these colors are pretty to anyone.  You can also see that I decided to work the boundary between the colors with a row of both colors together.  I like the shaggy, kind of fringed, effect this gave.

I ringed the blanket (worked in stockinette stitch because I love the smoothness of stockinette) with a checkerboard or basket weave pattern.

Here you can see a close up of the edging and you can also see what the back looks like.  I like the back of stockinette almost as much as the front because I like the uniformity of it.  The color of this photo is off -- a little bit greener than the yarns look in real life.

     Up close here you can see the "wrapped" look of the left side of my stitches (on the right side).  This is because I knit in the less common method that my mother calls "backwards."  ha ha ha...  I like knitting this way, not only because it's the way I taught myself to start with, but because I've always had very uniform stitches.  In later reading I found that this uniformity is why those who consciously choose to knit in this way do so.  I had no idea that there was anything unusual about the method when I first learned.  I taught myself to knit from an issue of Martha Stewart Living, and I couldn't tell you if it described this method or if I merely misunderstood and it worked out -- but either way, I like the way I knit.  My only problem is that I have trouble knitting in the round.  I don't know if that has anything to do with my method or not.  I can do it (I knitted most of one sock once), but I have trouble in the beginning with understanding which side is the right side and which is the wrong side.  I think I tended to work my rows inside out.

   When I have photos to show of this week's projects I'll post those.