Pinwheel blanket

Project Details:
Knit with KnitPicks' Shine Worsted in Wisteria, Grass, Sea Spray (discontinued), Wave (discontinued), and Bachelor Button
Used 20 balls of yarn (roughly 1 kg or 1500 yards)
Used size 6 nickel plated interchangeable circular needles from KnitPicks
Pattern: Modified (heavily) Pinwheel Blanket
Lined with fleece
Blanket diameter is 50 inches (about 4 feet)

Started: February 2008
Finished: March 2009

This was by far the largest project I have ever done. Each piece took about 3 hours to knit up, another 45 minutes or so to seam, and about 20 minutes to stitch the backing onto (not that I did that individually - I'm not crazy! Oh, wait...) Plus the time to actually pin the blanket to the backing (harder than it sounds) it probably took the better part of 45 hours actual work time to complete. Plus it was all stockinette... fast? yes, boring? also yes. Anyway, I'm quite pleased with how it turned out.

So I started off really liking the pinwheel blankets I kept seeing crop up. They were cute, I liked the swirl, and I liked the way you could play with colors on them. I did not like the fact that the color strips and pinwheel stripes were perpendicular. So I decided to do each section a separate color. Since knitting in the round would not be easy if I changed colors so frequently, I decided to knit each piece and then seam them together. (I could have knit it all together and just left one opening, but that would be a really big project to carry around, and I didn't think of it.)

I cast on two stitches, purled them, knit across to the last stitch, did a yarn-over, knit the last stitch, and purled back. it went on like this. And on. And on. Basically I decided that since I had 4 balls of each color yarn, I should use two for each section. Maybe a little less in case one ball was short. I wound up casting off when I got to 80 stitches. Eventually I wound up with 5 pieces. I decided that this would be a good time to start seaming, since I could lay the colors all out together and see the order I wanted them in. I also figured that this way I wouldn't have to do all the seaming at once. It was a good plan.

This is what the first five pieces looked like when seamed together:

It was a bit curlier than I wanted, but I figured that would go away when I finished. I was right. Here's a closeup of the fabric:


Miles of stockinette are pretty boring to talk about, so I will skip all of that. There was some excitement when, at the very end of the very last section (which happened to be in Grass) I ran out of yarn. On the last row. No lie. Everything else I'd had extra on, but not the grass, apparently. So I had to order another skein, wait for that, and then join so I could cast off. Another note about the yarn: It doesn't exactly pill, but quite a bit of the fiber will come off on your hands as you work with it. It will get everywhere. It doesn't seem to do this once it's knit up and washed, however. It's very soft and shiny though, which I feel makes up for the little bits of colorful yarn all over my room and clothing.

Finally I finished, though, seamed it all together, and wove in all my ends. I realized that I did not like how the backside looked, and it was not going to be very warm since it was cotton. (The reason I chose cotton in the first place was that 1) it's washable and 2) I really like heavy blankets, but often get too warm under them.) I decided to add a lining to the back of the blanket. The debate was between flannel and fleece, and fleece won out. I chose a nice neutral grey that will (hopefully) not show stains. I put them both through the washer (cold water) together, to make sure they wouldn't shrink differently once they were sewn together.

Keeping in mind that I am not a sewer, have never been a sewer, and probably will never be a sewer (straight lines are hard, okay??) It took me a while to figure out how to attach the fleece. Eventually I decided I'd just do a simple running stitch all the way around with one of the yarns I had some extra of (the Grass.) I set to work pinning the blanket to the fleece. The first attempt went badly and I wound up with a strange ovoid shape that I *could not* make into a circle. No matter how hard I tried. Then I got smart: I stretched the blanket out, measured the radius (25") picked a point on the fleece to call the center, and measured 25 inches out from there all the way around until I had a circle (I marked it with a permanent marker.) Then I pinned the blanket down. I still was having trouble, though, because I'd stretch out some of the sections and other sections wound end up squooshed. I realized that I knew the radius, could calculate the circumference, and could divide that by 10 to tell me how wide each section should be. I then measured these out and pinned. It worked beautifully.

Here is a picture of the pinned blanket, with a quarter on it for size reference:

After that, all that was left was to sew. So I started in. I started off just doing tiny little stitches and attaching to every stitch in the row I chose (about an inch in). This came out looking uneven, bunching, and took way too long. I pulled it all out, decided that stitches of half an inch each would do wonderfully, and proceeded to measure every single stitch as it went in. Again, I picked a row about an inch in, and I counted three knit stitches between each sewn stitch. This was tedious, but produced a really nice, even stitching.

Stitching!

Once that was done, I tacked the middle of the blanket to the fleece, and trimmed the fleece so it went bout a centimeter past the stitching.

It's done! And Mr. Bear likes it very much...

I'm still debating if I want to add more tacking, and if so, where. But for now, I'm very happy with my heavy, cozy, warm, colorful blanket.