Having just been brought to my knees once again by the copykat shawl I decided to work on a project that I was (a) excited about and (b) likely to finish before the next ice age arrived.

A while ago I found the Easy Blanket pattern on the fabulous Norwegian knitting site, Pickles link text . What a great place! My Norwegian knitting friend, Sigrid, pointed it out to me and I’m just in love with it. Not only is there a stack of gorgeous knitting inspiration there, you can learn another language while you’re at it! Who knew that “coffee cosy” in Norwegian would be kaffevarmer? I feel positively cosmopolitan just reading it all.

This was the cruisy, fun project I’d been waiting for and I’m so glad I parked the shawl and got stuck into it. Even the (four sentence-long) pattern is fun. Look at the materials – 1000g of yarn. Yes, you get to go to a shop and ask for a kilo of wool, please! It’s like being told to mug a sheep.

I also had to laugh at the 20mm diameter, 120cm-long circular needle. Unwrapping it, I thought I’d mistakenly ordered a skipping rope. When I got to use it I felt that I was knitting with hockey sticks. Who can be cross when you’re playing with such ridiculous tools?

There’s a photo here of the wool and needles sitting next to my current bus project, a hat. That’s 8ply wool and 4mm needles, but next to the mammoth blankie kit it looks like I’m knitting with toothpicks and dental floss …

I chose lovely local Nundle wool in a gorgeous red colour. The Nundle 20ply looked about the same as the recommended Pickles yarn and I just love that I’ve seen skinnier rope tying up the Queen Mary.

When it came to casting on, 45 stitches looked a bit short, even using the knitted cast-on for a bit of stretch, so I made it 49. The advertised “two evenings” to knit it didn’t really work out – perhaps those Pickles girls are handier with the hockey sticks than I am. Or perhaps it was some cunning Nordic interpretation of a midnight sun sort of concept.

Either way, it was very fast to knit, especially for moss stitch. I think it took me about 40 hours of knitting in total and I’m a painfully slow knitter. I’ve made a log cabin blanket link text and a keepsake blanket link text and they each took about three months, so a blanket that I finished in three weeks of sporadic work was a miracle.

I only used four of the Nundle 200g skeins before casting off in pattern. The blanket was already 150cm long at that stage and it was a bit skinny so I thought I should stop before the proportions were weird. Also, I was bored.

Before blocking, it measured 87 x 153 cm and that changed to 106 x 153 after it was washed. If I make another one, and I’m tempted, I would cast on a few more stitches, perhaps 67 – 71, and use five skeins.

The name came from my visiting Dad, who was startled by the red knitted mountain on my armchair. (A note to the houseproud: when you’re on the final skein this project won’t fit into any project bag known to knitterkind. Don’t try to tidy it away unless you want to stuff it into a doona cover and allocate it to its own cupboard).

Once Dad calmed down and inspected the blankie-in-progress, he said it looked like chainmail, so that is what I call it.

The chainmail blanket was meant to be a throw for the spare bed but it’s very useful as a nap-facilitation tool on my sofa …

UPDATE
I did make another blanket and it’s a much better size: link text