Group Project

Knitters like to celebrate each other's milestone events like weddings and babies - and if one of us adopts a teenager, that definitely counts, too! We figure that if we would knit tiny booties and sweaters for a new baby who joined one of our families, it makes sense to knit something for a new teenager. A blanket is a good group project. We've done group blankets before, notably this one and this one.

Last weekend, we surprised (I hope) our friend Caitlin and her daughter with a handknit blanket. We heard that she likes rainbows so we ran with that color scheme. We made mitered squares with a gray border. Our yarn of choice for blankets is Cascade 220 Superwash. We used colors 809 Really Red, 822 Pumpkin, 263 Gold Fusion, 802 Green Apple, 311 Blue Sapphire, 257 Violet Indigo, and 892 Spaceneedle. We used 2 balls of each rainbow color and 4-5 balls of the grey. 8 of us worked on this project (Julie, Alison, Kris, Barb, Annette, Marta, Jess, and me).

As usual, we had to hand off balls of yarn throughout the knitting process. Each ball of yarn (in the rainbow colors) yielded 2.5 blanket squares, so someone always had to get a half a ball to someone else. And the gray made its rounds, too. Here's a dropoff in the anthropology department offices:

Our squares are about 10" across, so the finished throw is about 50" x 60".

Most of our squares were done in November, so we laid them out on the floor and pondered the best final arrangement. Here's Barb trying for a bird's eye view:

Once we were done, we assigned knitters to seam each strip and photographed it, so we could all be sure to attach our squares on the correct sides:

After all the seaming was done, I picked up stitches on the two sides not yet bordered by grey yarn, and worked the edges.

She loves it, and we are so happy to have another crafter into our fold. Welcome!!!