Several years ago I thought it would be fun to give Virginia the gift of the Palette Sampler. I can’t remember how many balls of yarn they included in the sampler, but I think it was one of each of their colors. It just so happened that one of her friends decided that this would be a fun gift, too. Suffice it to say, she had to do some major rearranging to accommodate this sudden (and large) influx of yarn.
Some of you may remember the Fair Isle sweater she created with some of the yarn. As exciting as it was to design and knit a sweater like that, she could have knit another 20 sweaters just like it, and still have some of that yarn left over. No doing.
Thus was born the Log Cabin Blanket, a garter stitch extravaganza using the fingering-weight yarn doubled.
Two years in the making, this blanket has seen a lot of television. I believe it made it through PBS’s entire Jane Austen series last winter, not to mention a collection of several complete seasons of shows like, Flight of the Conchords, Jeeves and Wooster… now that I think about it, the blanket may have actually witnessed Mr. Darcy’s penetrating looks several times over the course of its creation.
The final push came this weekend. The last row had been picked up (all 250 stitches of it) and all that was required to move it from its basket to the bed was several hours of heavy knitting (and some crochet around the edges).
It’s done. And, now that KnitPicks has refined their color palette to more heathery and somewhat more sophisticated colors, Virginia has (not surprisingly) opened herself up to the possibility of trying something like this, again. Until then, it’s nice to have some space back, and a significant chunk taken out of her stash.
