My Ten-Stitch Blanket

Elizabeth Zimmerman in her book, ¨The Opinionated Knitter, gives directions on how to make a mitred-corner blanket using strips of simple garter stitch knitted fabric. She has the knitter hand sew together all the pieces. It is such a simple idea and a great way to use up small odds and ends of leftover yarn. The only problem for me is all that hand sewing which does not play to my strengths. A designer, Frankie Brown, inspired by the EZ technique revised the work using the ten stitch idea and connecting the new strip to the previous one as the project is knit. This offers all the advantages of a simple design and none of the, for me, tedious sewing. I have started such a blanket for myself a year or so ago. It uses up those bits of yarn left from 20 years of knitting, mainly scarves, shawls and mittens. As I reviewed my stash I realized there was also a fair amount of short yardage hand spun wool. Mainly it was samples I had made in the spinning classes I had taken. Some of the spinning is very bad but was never tossed; it was knit into this blanket just as a reminder. Now I get great pleasure looking at the worst of the hand spun, the pink on the lower right side of the photo. My skills regarding spinning have really gotten much better. And I am reminded of certain projects I completed like the blue/black yarn of my first lace shawl, or the scraps from a failed linen stitch scarf. Even the cats seem to enjoy snuggling under my Memory blank. This previously shown photo includes the wool I spun this summer.

When I found out Lee and his wife are expecting a baby I knew exactly what I would make, one of these blankets. I own a lot of superwash sock yarn; a yarn manufactured to be washed in a machine and not by hand. There is so much in my stash it has periodically been used to knit up shawls as well as socks. This was a good choice, but sock yarn is thin meaning small #2 US needles were used to get the kind of fabric I wanted for this blanket. In May of this year I started making my baby ten-stitch blanket. It is simple, mindless knitting of every stitch and the short-row approach of the corners was a welcome change of pace. All summer long I felt like this:

As the size of the blanket grew new ways to fold it in my lap needed to be found. Having a large wad of wool in my lap, even in an air-conditioned house, made for hot work. Each color change was very much anticipated. You can almost tell by looking at the blanket when I found out the baby would be a boy. The pastel colors changed to darker hues until Mom said I needed to lighten it up. Round and round I went all summer long until September. By then the knitting had lost some of its sparkle, the world wasn´t getting better and that baby boy is starting to think about entering this world. (He isn´t due until November, but I like to get things done in advance if I can.) Each round started to use an entire 250 yard skein and eventually that skein would complete only a partial round. Slowly I began to dislike knitting that same color for days to a week at a time. So on Sunday as I watched my undefeated Green Bay Packers win another football game I came to a corner where all the sides lined up and decided it was time for the project to come to an end before I started to hate it. The bind-off (there are only ten active stitches) was done in a flash and the blanket was tossed in the washer and hung on the line to dry. My assumption is this will be exactly the way the new busy parents care for it so why pamper this blanket now. Here is the finished project. There are about 265,000 stitches measuring about 32 inches by 32 inches. It should be big enough for this newborn whose mom is 6 foot tall and dad is 6 foot 6 inches. It was lots of carefree handwork during the first part of the pandemic, but it has more important things to do in the near future.