I’ve been knitting a lot of toys lately for new babies. I thought i’d switch it up by knitting a blanket.

01/25/2012 - Just started this pattern and so far it’s super easy. A very easy movie watching pattern!

05/06/2012 - Finally finished the inside square, picked up stiches for the edge and started to knit the lacey edge.

I was having challenges picking up the right number of stiches. To help, I used a tip from the Panopticon blog and folded the blanket in half, marked that with stich markers than i know i needed to pick up 55 stiches per section. With a spare needle i picked up a stich from each of the ridges (about 40 per section) so i knew that for each section i just needed to pick up 15 stiches eveningly across that section. it worked like a charm, and was far less stressful than trying to do the whole thing in one stretch.

The other frustration saving thing i did was to mark out each of the 18 stitch repeats so i didn’t have to constanley count. Only, i was on a tropical island at the time so i had to improvise when it came to stitch markers with elastics, pop tabs, the plastic circles from the tops of water bottles… needless to say, it looks rather interesting.

UPDATE - I heard back from my friend Cara who was the recipient of this blanket. Sounds like she loves it. Excellent!