One of my longest-lasting craft crushes has been the Strips and Stripes blanket link text. I have admired it for ages and it was filed in the “One Day” section of my knitting mind, but somehow pushed to the back of the queue by more urgent projects.

A few Bendigos ago, my sister, patient knitting mentor Itsagift, invested in a sheep’s worth of Fibreworks merino in incredibly lush colours, with the plan to create a Moderne blanket link text. She got part of the way through the first block, remembered that she hated garter stitch with a passion, and parked the lot in a plastic storage bin.

The thought of unused gorgeous Fibreworks never seeing the light of day tortured me until I realised I could combine that lovely yarn with my Strips and Stripes craving and knit Itsagift a blanket as a tiny partial repayment for all the years of knitting she’s done for me and my friends. And so it began. I carted home a massive bag of merino, took a deep breath and cast on.

I wish I could say that I planned the project meticulously but I can’t even type those words without laughing so much that the screen goes all blurry. It’s me, after all. I did decide to go down a needle size and knit the strips on 3.75mm needles to create a slightly more dense fabric, so it would counteract potential droopiness in such a heavy object. That’s about as far as the thoughtfulness went. My original plan was to knit each strip as a single colour and let the variegated yarn provide all the interest, but I changed my mind after a few stripes and made some of them as stripey ones from the leftover yarn, to use up as much of it as I could and to break up the blocks of solid colour.

I’m not sure why I ignored the enormous amount of sewing needed for this project when I chose it. I hate sewing – I have a shirt I haven’t worn for three years because a button fell off it – so I just don’t know what I thought would happen when twelve strips of knitting needed to be joined up to make an actual blanket. At once stage I pondered giving Itsagift the strips in a bag, with a tapestry needle and the leftover yarn, and a card saying “Happy Christmas, here’s your present. Note, some assembly required”. Somehow, though, that seemed a bit mean, especially given that I had missed the Christmas deadline by a mile and it was now February, so I decided to be a big girl and just get cracking.

I got cracking and it took ages, but the strips were ineptly joined in a precarious sort of fashion and the whole thing started to look like it could be about to be finished. The plans for a border had become increasingly simple as the project progressed and I got more bored with knitting it, so we ended up with an i-cord border and minimal fussing. As usual, I went through all my Elizabeth Zimmermann books, got confused and teary and resorted to Google to work out the applied i-cord. I thoroughly recommend the Purl Bee tutorial as one that even I could understand: link text. I was so inspired that I got all fancy and did a provisional cast-on and the proper square corners, so I am quietly chuffed about that part. Less chuffed about the lumpy grafting but I still think I should get points for effort.

So the epic blanket project has come to an end and I got to make my own messy tribute to Strips and Stripes. Itsagift has a blanket to warm her tootsies on the sofa as the cool weather approaches and I have a new-found interest in very small knitted objects. Baby hats, anyone?