Knitting Ranger

It's been a bit more quiet these weeks, as I have been busy with yet another baby blanket, shown below. It has a wide rim and two squares in the middle. I decided to add a crocheted rim in three different shades of blue. Even though the blanket is supposed to be for a girl. But in art history blue used to be associated with girls and women and red was associated with boys (see here for example http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue).

I used Merino 160 by Austermann, colour 210 - cream white and a 3.5 size needle. The main part is in seed pattern. The squares are set apart by a simple left-right-pattern - 20 stitches. The rim is made of two rows of half-double crochets (light blue and darker blue) and the finish is made of picots (in dark blue). As these were made with left-over wool from previous projects I cannot tell, what wool or colour it was. I am not the biggest fan of crocheting, but for these projects I go through the pain. For me, crocheting is rather unsocial, because I still have to focus on where the needle goes, while when knitting I can watch a movie or read a book.

The final measurements are 86cmx99cm (34"x39").

Something I do quite regularly - and currently as well - are baby blankets. Here is just a collection of a two I did in the past. I did several others, but forgot to take pictures of them.

This is a simple blanket, with a crocheted border, which makes it a bit more elaborate:


This is a chessboard pattern, with a blue border as a contrast:

I wanted to try my hand in Bobbin Lace ever since I saw women in Belgium doing that - approximately 20 years back. It looked like magic and the results looked very delicate and beautiful. So I wanted to try my hand and decided to do an owl as a birthday gift for a fried who is very fond of owls.

So this is the work in progress:

Unfortunately, I forgot to take a picture of the final piece :(

Some news. I made a pullover sevarl years back based on various patterns I had found for my kids. And they both loved it and wore it for quite some time. Now they are both slighly too big for it, so I had to do something new and I tried to do something similar - similar color and similar pattern. So here they are the original and the new - both patterns are my own. For a change I charted the pattern, but honestly I did not follow it exactly. Plus, I thought I would run out of wool, so I changed the pattern in the upper part of the pullover until I found the additional two balls of wool, but I was too lazy to undo what I had already knitted, so there it is. I'm not too happy about it, but the kids fight over who is allowed to wear it, so I guess it turned out ok.

This is the old pullover:


This is a detail of the arm of the old version:


And this is the new version:


With a detail of the arm: