07-18-2022

Loved the design and look of this blanket, but I’m not a fan of sewing knitted pieces together. So I thought I’d see if I could knit this blanket in one piece, intarsia-style - and that’s what I did!

Pattern calls for size 8 needles, I went down to size 7 but still did not get gauge - so my finished blanket turned out larger. No worries, it’s a blanket - for a baby. I adjusted a bit by making each square 20 sts by 40 rows (20 garter ridges) rather than 20 sts by 42 rows.

My first time using this cast on and cast off - LOVE the beautiful edges. I also slipped the first stitch of each row to get neat side edges.

Had to look up the proper way to do intarsia in garter stitch - thank you to this tutorial for showing me the way.

Pattern instructions call for knitting the blanket in strips to stitch together, but since I was determined to do this in one piece, I made myself a chart (see pic). I noticed that there was one place where two blocks of the same color (color A) were placed adjoining each other -?? really? That just seemed … -wrong-. Careful study of lvandam’s Quick (?) blankie showed that she cleverly resolved this peculiar pattern bug/“feature?” by switching the color A square in the middle of the row with a color B square in the row above. NIce! I shamelessly copied this strategy as well as adopting her color choices as well. Thank you, lvandam, for the inspiration.
A: Heartland - Glacier Bay
B: With Love - Sage
C: Heartland - Olympic
D: Super Saver - Flamingo
E: mystery gray yarn - had no label
F: Super Saver - Minty

I knit up a couple sample squares and weighed them to see how much yarn I needed to make a square. Then I wound up mini balls for each row as I progressed, sealing them in small zipper baggies to keep them neat while I worked. This kept things just manageable when I got to the row with 11 squares in it.

And since I really wanted the back of the blanket to look as neat as the front, I also used this tutorial as a guide for a good technique for weaving in the ends in garter stitch. Several of the pics show the back of the finished blanket - I’m definitely pleased with how it turned out. Yes, this pattern has lots of ends to work in, but at least I saved myself having to stitch it all up as well!