sekrit baby blanket: done!

Finished the knitting in Grand Forks.  Finished the weaving-in of ends tonight, including an emergency fix of a mystery snag -- but I did it!  Intended to make a braided cord to tie it all up with; that didn't work out so well, but I did a backup much-less-tangled thing.  Package is ready to go.  Pictures tomorrow; now, off to bed.

Yay!

i promised pictures

(tangent: you know what else, besides my own shower, is wonderful about being home? my own bed, that's what. the bed i was in at the Forks was comfy enough, but the pillows were like unto flannel-covered stones. last night i got in my own bed and put my head down on pillows that gave under its weight and ahhhh, bliss.)

So when last we saw the Sekrit Baby Blanket, I had completed about four and a half of nine stripes. It was at that point that my Clever Plan of recording each day's progress fell to pieces. I have one more picture that I took when I'd completed that orange stripe and got halfway through the orange-and-yellow one --



-- but then I worked on it some more and didn't take pictures and then I went to Grand Forks and didn't take my camera, and long story short, I finished the thing and brought it home and here it is.


In this picture, as you see, the ends need to be woven in, so you can still feel like you're seeing the work in progress.

Here it is post-end-weaving:


It was while I was weaving in the ends that I came upon what had the potential to be a serious disaster. I'd seen that there was a bit of a glitch in what I'm going to have to call the pink stripe (it's quite salmon-y coral, really, but in this picture, it's just plain pink; third stripe from the dark end), and resigned myself to it, because everything handmade ought to have one mistake in it, right, of course right. But now there seemed to be an end to weave in where I hadn't remembered changing skeins. And this was because it wasn't an end. It was a loop I could just about fit my hand through -- in other words, a great big effing snag. Every other row of this thing is knit one, slip one, so there's plenty of snaggable long-loop stitches. Sure enough, the row with that snag in it was tightened up, the way things get when you pull them, and fuck. You can sort of see it in the post-weaving picture, although I hid most of it with the folding over. In the middle of the pink stripe, right under the cream corner, see how it looks darker? Yeah, that's because one row is shoved up next to the next row, and there's a gap in the stitches behind it. Trust me, it makes sense, even if I can't articulate it properly; I'm only telling you about it because I was able to fix it.

I thought I'd find a way to work the loop in where it was, adding it to the stitches surrounding it somehow. But it didn't take long to decide that this was a no-go. Then I thought I'd work the loop down to one end of the row, and weave it in there. I got it all the way down there, but the too-tight row was really bugging me, and I couldn't massage the stitches back into place -- which was when I realized that what I needed to do was distribute the loop evenly across the whole row so that it could relax back into place and be more like the rows before and after it. (This makes sense, too. I needed to un-snag the snag, basically.) So I did this, very patiently, and the blanket, she is fixed. (And the glitch that started the whole thing? was just a gappy spot where I hadn't noticed the massive snag yet, because I thought it was an end I was going to have to weave in. Which is good, because I know there was a mistake at one end of one of the rows where I changed colors. Not a big one, but I know it's there. Didn't want to have two. Heh.

Anyway, once I'd dealt with all that, the blanket was well and truly done. See how it drapes over the back of my comfy chair?



I was going to braid one strand of each of the colors into a cord to tie it up with, but after a couple of attempts I chucked that plan. Instead, I tied them together in a very plain rope-chain thing and used that. Here is the blankie all tied up in a bundle.



And done! [eta: {doing math} I cast on 121 with a double cast-on, which creates a knit row; the solid color stripes begin and end with a k1s1 row, and there are fourteen such rows, so that's 27 rows per solid stripe; the mixed color stripes begin and end with a knit row, and there are 13 k1s1 rows, so that's 27 rows per mixed stripe; there are nine stripes; and I knit one more row and then bound off. So that's cast-on + knit a row + 27 rows x 9 stripes + knit a row + bind-off = 247 rows, for a total of {drum roll} 29,887 stitches. Hooray!] On to next project. What shall I make now?