This blanket is inspired by the Hans Christian Andersen story “The Snow Queen.” In that story, the queen holds one of main characters captive and tells him he will be released if he can spell the work “Eternity” with some ice crystals, which take the form of a Tangram, or Chinese puzzle. The center piece of the blanket is, of course, a big puzzle set. The characters surrounding are from various Andersen stories.

On the left side are the primary characters from the Snow Queen. At the top is the queen, herself. Next are Kai and Gerda ice skating. On the bottom is Kai’s grandmother, dancing.

Along the top is a fish from “The Little Mermaid,” the princess laying in bed from “The Princess and the Pea,” followed by the crow, also from “The Snow Queen.”

On the bottom row is a puppy from “The Tinder Box,” and because everyone loves a puppy. The next two are the duckling and the swan from “The Ugly Duckling.”

On the ride side are the numerals 2014 and a horse, since 2014 is the year of the horse on the Chinese calendar. Plus, everyone likes a pony.

The most challenging part of this project is making each puzzle piece, exactly the same size. It started with a large stockinette gauge patch, from which the exact width and height of the stitches were calculated. A compute program was used to print graph paper with those exact cell dimensions, taped together, and the center piece laid out. For the figures, the colored pieces were cut from construction paper before transfering to graph paper.

All the diagonal edges are straight, no saw-toothing. That was accomplished via increases and either left or right-slanting decreases. Along with the frequent color changes, these figures take quite a while to knit. Sorry folks, but this is not a quick and easy blanket. I probably have a good 200 hours in this one, including the planning. Each of the figures took 8-10 hours, each.