It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue

Behold: my finished Leaves of Grass blanket. It was a crazy plan, but it was actually a pretty good plan if you looked past the crazy. The two main bits of crazy were: (1) this is a shawl pattern with no yardage suggestions for scaling it up to a blanket, and a brand-new shawl pattern at that, so there were no other people on Ravelry yet who had attempted to blanket-ify it, and (2) I mailed it to my parents’ house while in progress so that I could finish it there over winter break and block it in their spacious basement, and then I shipped it back to my tiny California apartment. But Crazy Bit #1 wasn’t so bad, because I’d already made Girasole, another pi-shawl/blanket from Jared Flood, and I had a pretty good idea of the yardage I’d need. Plus I chose to use Cascade Eco+ for the yarn, which comes in enormous 478-yard skeins, so I figured that buying 4 of them would be more than enough. And it was — barely. I ended up with only 20% of my last skein left over. (All in all, it took 1,816 yards. Yowza!) And Crazy Bit #2, while definitely having some red flags for craziness, was actually a thoroughly reasonable plan. What would have been really crazy would have been to knit this here in California and then having to rearrange our furniture to get a space big enough to block it, rendering our living room useless for days. Also, knitting a big wooly blanket over the (admittedly tame) midwinter weeks that I was visiting the east coast was thoroughly delightful.

Another part of the plan that was arguably crazy was that it involved a hard deadline on an enormous project — and things like edging always take three times longer than you think they will. I was actually a little amazed at how well I estimated how long it would take me to knit this thing — and it would have worked out perfectly… if I had remembered to pack the ultra-long Knitpicks cables that I would need once the blanket got to its full hugeness. But since I forgot them and didn’t realize this until the in-progress blanket arrived at my parents’ house, I lost four or five days to ordering new cables and waiting for them to arrive. So for my last few days in New Jersey, I was lugging the blanket around in a giant department-store shopping bag everywhere I went, insisting on knitting at friends’ houses and veterinary waiting rooms. On my second-to-last night in town, I stayed up until 4:30 in the morning, shotgunning episodes of Dr. Who and working furiously to finish the edging. But I did finish, and I soaked the blanket in the bathtub, and I pinned it out before going to bed. Here’s a slightly-crappy blocking shot:

I had fantasized that if I pinned it out on Wednesday night, then I might be able to unpin it and ship it myself on Friday before I left. But on Friday morning it was still a little damp, so I ended up entrusting my parents with the unpinning and shipping. And today, the finished blanket finally arrived!

One of the reasons I was making this blanket is because Pat always complains that my Girasole seems deliberately designed to not allow him to cover his toes and his shoulders at the same time. I told him that I couldn’t make any promises about this one, but I was optimistic. And behold:

Naptastic!