Planning and Design
Last year I made my very first knit sweater 😊 Unfortunately, I didn’t actually like it much 🙃 The wool was amazingly soft though, so I decided to repurpose it. Since my mum moved 5 hours south to a much colder town, I figured this would be a good excuse to make a knit blanket. I usually can’t justify it, because I live with cats and so having a wool blanket is a recipe for disaster. Also, wool is expensive so I can’t justify spending that much on brand new wool for a blanket (even though I would pay that much for materials to make a quilted blanket haha…I guess the difference is one is easier to care for – read chuck in the washing machine – than the other). It’s also an excuse to knit up something in fisherman’s rib. I have done this for a scarf in chunky wool and the result was actually too chonk to wear as a scarf LOL. So I figured it would be perfect for a blanket.
Materials
- Pattern
- Fisherman’s Rib Throw (Loopy Mango)
- Wool
- Merino No. 5 – Midnight (Loopy Mango)
Sustainability Check
👍 Wool is 100% biodegradable and was also repurposed
Construction
Deconstruction
Luckily I didn’t felt in any of the ends of the sweater, although it was a little hard to find the tails that I had woven through. I did most of the unravelling while in the car, travelling down to visit my mum for the first time haha. Although even unravelling seems to give me motion sickness 🙁
The very last bit I got my nieces to help me. They had quite a bit of fun with that 😝 Although it almost backfired since they kinda fell in love with how soft the wool was and kept asking me if they could have it…sorry girls, neither of you are old enough yet to appreciate how expensive this wool is haha. I did have to sacrifice a couple of small balls of wool for them to play with for the duration of the trip.
Trial & Error Tension
So one of the reasons I didn’t like the knit sweater I made was because my tension probably wasn’t correct. And doing this project confirmed that. I was loosely basing the ‘design’ on the Fisherman’s Rib Throw from the Loopy Manga book but I only had about half the wool. So was planning on doing 30 stitches instead of 40 and then knitting as long as it would get. But after I had knit about 40cm length, I realised that it wasn’t really wide enough to fully cover my legs when sitting down, so undid it all and changed it back to 40cm. I think my stitches must be much tighter than normal. And then I ended up unravelling it all again, because I wasn’t confident I was doing the fisherman’s rib stitch properly. I wasn’t really sure if Loopy Mango’s instructions were correct, so used the instructions from here instead. And my edges ended up looking neater. I guess this particular method of fisherman’s rib works better for me.
Reflections
This blanket should be super warm! It definitely warmed me while I was knitting it haha. And I’m really happy with how I managed to not stuff up the rib knit at all LOL. Rib stitches make it nice and easy to confirm.
Also looking forward to trying the Sailors Dream Sweater again. Since this time I will do a tension swatch, I swear 😁
Things I learnt:
- I’m starting to get pretty good at telling what is a purl/knit stitch from it’s appearance on the knitting needle 🤣 Little things, but it was this exact thing that put me off knitting for a long time (cos I just couldn’t wrap my head around it)
- Confirming my tension is probably on the tight side
Categories: Fibre Arts
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