Log Cabin Update

Those of you who knit may find today’s post interesting. You’ll mock my skills and feel far better about your own but hopefully you’ll enjoy the post nonetheless. Those of you who don’t knit will hopefully forgive me for my bragging posting about the project I currently have on my needles.

Since this afghan is going to take several years months to finish, I wanted to document my progress. Hopefully this will inspire me to keep going when it doesn’t seem to be growing no matter how many stitches I pick up for each new log.

As I mentioned a few weeks ago, I am working on a Log Cabin Blanket. I decided to try this pattern after seeing several amazing finished blankets online. I like recipes with photos so I know what my dinner is supposed to look like, and the same goes for my knitting patterns.

The first (vaguely geeky) thing I did was to play with colours in Excel. I copied the pattern into Excel and popped different colours into the rectangles until my mother, father, and I were finally able to agree on a colour scheme.

Next, I did something I never do – I knitted a swatch. Swatches or gauge squares are much talked about and beloved in the knitting community. I for one have never believed in wasting good yarn and, better, time on knitting a tiny square whose job it is to tell that I knit too tightly. But I’m weird like that. My goal for this swatch was to learn how to pick up stitches – a fairly common knitting skill I had managed to avoid thus far.

With a firm plan in mind, my mother drove me to Mary’s Yarns – our fabulous LYS – where we bought three skeins of Cascade 220 in each of the needed five colours. (Remind me to tell you about the rather interesting economic reasons behind yarn being sold in skeins rather than the easier-to-use balls.)

Each block or “log” is twenty rows or ten bumps high. I finished the first complete round (one block of each colour) before I left Toronto at the end of April. Now a month later, I just finished my fourth complete round and am still miraculously on the first ball of each colour. The afghan measures 57cm by 63cm. This thing is going to be huge by the time I’m done!

I’d blog about my blanket some more but I obviously have some knitting to get to.