Saturday, October 4, 2008

Spiral Monstrosity

The spiral blanket was started on a whim a lo-o-ong time ago. February 4th, 2008 to be exact. I noticed a friend at knit night was making one and it looked like a really fun project - and quick - HAH! I soon got kind of bored with the constant knitting, no variation so I decided to add in some color. I tried my hand at some color blocks. I did a section of squares followed by some other color sequences and then a section of diamonds (birds, my dh thinks) and when I started a section of circles I decided that these color blocks were not so much fun to do on such a large project. The yarn kept getting tangled and I started to worry that the blanket would not lay flat. It was just WAY too fiddly.


The birth of a new pattern to keep my interest. Rows of color. I knit 5 rows, purled 1 row, knit 1 row, did one row of k2tog, yo, knit 1 row, purl 1 row, and 5 more rows of knit to complete the pattern.
This orange section was started 7/31/2008. At this point, there were more than 623 stitches on the needle.

After the orange pattern was complete, there were 5 rows of dark purple, 10 rows of variegated and 5 more rows of dark purple. On 8/9/2008 the white was added and this section was completed the same as the orange section. This was followed by the same 5k rows purple, 10k rows variegated, and 5k rows purple and on 8/24/2008 the teal was added.



After the teal section there are 5 knit rows of purple and then I started a spiral that another friend at knit night was talking about. It is kind of cool how this works - basically you just add in a ball of yarn at any point and keep knitting. When you get to the new color, you drop the old yarn and continue with the new one without having to twist the yarn. It works!! The decision to do a spiral was two fold: 1) to try out something new and 2) to use up all those little balls of yarn left over from the color blocks and stripes. The spiral is now 25 rows deep and I really like it. It is so neat the way the spiral works and keeps me going - just to the next color change.....
Right now there are 1200 stitches on the needle, the radius is 39 inches which means the diameter is 78 inches. I found the formula for circumference (it doesn't matter that I learned this back in the 8th grade!!) and figured out that the circumference right now is approximately 20.41 feet. HMMM......maybe this will be our new slip cover for the couch!


2 comments:

hakucho said...

Wow, your blanket is awesome :) Such pretty colors, but oh, my goodness so many stitches :)

happy knitting :)

Shan said...

Holy crap, lady, are you crazy?!