I've had this book for years and I've always wanted to try my hand at a knitted blanket. The skills are easy but the amount of time it would take to knit all of the squares always made me shy away from it. The project that has me inspired is the patchwork afghan that you see here made for a llama:
I'm making one about four times the size. To digress for a moment, the idea came strongly to me the other day that I'm supposed to knit a prayer shawl which I've never done before. I started researching prayer shawl patterns until it eventually took me full circle back to the blanket for the llama. I'm knitting 48 squares which will be whip stitched together to form one big blanket. Each square consists of 30 stitches across by 56 rows. Each square is built around a specific prayer, mantra or intention. With each stitch that I knit, I say that prayer, mantra or intention. By the time I finish 48 squares, we will be wrapping ourselves in over 80,000 blessings. The task of knitting each square no longer feels monotonous. Each square takes me about an hour to knit and I look at this as one hour of meditation/prayer/quiet time. My goal is to knit one square per day for 48 days. I will have this blanket done on September 26th, which is also my daughter's birthday. I've already stayed on track with my goal since I purchased the yarn on Tuesday. I'm working on my 6th square today.
This project has also taught me some lessons about yarn. I have to say that I have always been a bit of a yarn snob. All of my projects to date have been scarves and hats. They haven't required that much yarn so I'm much more willing to purchase expensive skeins that feel luxurious to me. I also prefer natural fibers with a sweet tooth for alpaca. With this project, I will need at least 2,200 yards of yarn. It simply isn't in my budget this time around to spend hundreds of dollars on this blanket. But I do want the best quality I can use for a reasonable price. After a lot of research, I decided to go with Patons Classic Wool which is 100% lambs wool and comes in a fairly decent range of colors. At $4.99 for a 223 yard skein, this stuff is a good buy and really nice to knit with.
I can't wait to show you the finished blanket in September!
What have you done this week?
