I feel like a broken record. Time flies by so fast these days, I always feel behind the eight ball. I’m trying to figure out something fiber related, our readers want to hear about, while pulling my hair out with Mom’s Alzheimer’s/Memory Care issues. Other families rarely visit their loved ones, to see incremental changes, that send up red flags. We are there every couple days, and we noticed behavior changes directly related to new medications. It’s so frustrating as her guardian, to know something isn’t right, getting a group of doctors to listen, and do something. Thank goodness we are retired, and can be available to meet whenever they are. It’s been quite a few weeks, of back and forth, and we appear to have a solution. So, you are getting a look at a mindless project I have been working on. It’s a work in progress (WIP) that I started January of 2022…and it’s time has come to get it done.

In reading recent FFS posts, it appears we are all mindful of using what we have, or finishing what we’ve started. This cosy blanket was created during Covid, to celebrate a long distance friendship: supposed to keep us warm during months of ongoing isolation. On its face, this is a basic diagonal washcloth pattern on steroids. It uses 3 strands of fingering weight yarn, held with a fluffy/fuzzy strand of lace weight yarn on a US-11 (interchangeable) circular needle. It could be any yarns you have in stash, just bump the needle size up or down as needed. It takes a lot of yarn, so be warned it will burn through your stash quickly.

I stocked up on bare yarn bases, for 4 yarn shows I booked before Covid struck, and everything went out the window. As this was a Christmas gift, I wanted a lovely blend of yarns, that would feel good against our skin. I wanted to use up the sparkling yarn (bottom, left) that wasn’t selling well, and I chose Suri Silk for my fluffy/fuzzy yarn.

Strand #3 came from my hand dyed yarns, and some from stash. Brian divided each skein in half – 50g for me, 50g for Lisa. The 10 skein colors meant we were both in each other’s blanket.

The last strand of yarn was from an enormous pile of 10g mini skeins, I traded with other yarn dyers. I pulled out minis I had duplicates of: 1 for Lisa, 1 in Capi. If you don’t have mini skeins, any strand of fingering yarn will do. However, I would be remiss if I didn’t mention the interesting results that happened, each time a random 10g mini skein makes color changes appear. The photo below shows diagonal striping happening across the blanket. Notice the obvious yellow stripe (approximately 10 rows at the longest diagonal rows) created by a 10g change

Let me tell you about the i-cord edge that goes around this blanket. My BFF Lisa wanted a professional finish on the edge of the blanket. While it is possible to add an i-cord edge after the blanket is finished, Lisa knew it should be able to be knit simultaneously. It took a little trial and error to work out. You can see the nice edge it gives the blanket, and it will reign in the stretching of an unbound blanket edge. She did a wonderful job, as you can see in the photos below. It’s achieved by establishing a 2 stitch border on both ends of the row with big obnoxious stitch markers. On the first pass, you slip the marker (sm) bring yarn in front (byif) and slip 2 stitches purl-wise (sl2pw) in other words slipped without knitting. Then turning your work…on the next row…you immediately knit those 2 stitches (k2) slip the marker (sm) and knit across to the marker on the other side, sl2pw…and repeat. In the pattern you will see these abbreviations. You may want to jot down the definitions on the pattern. We are amateurs at pattern writing, so you are getting our recipe, so to speak. Apologies if it isn’t clear enough: consider a test run with scrap yarn and a smaller needle.

I finished my blanket last night, and tweaked our pattern, inserting some helpful details. I hope you might give our pattern, a test run. If you knit with cotton yarn, you’ll get a face scrubbie, or washcloth, with a very nice edge.

Capi