So this is two nights running now with no knitting - I am too busy playing with the blog! But I really want to document the making of my first big project before it’s done - the Big Bad Baby Blanket (BBBB) from Stitch’N'Bitch. I wasn’t brave enough to order Koigu from the US for my very first serious project and I wasn’t keen to knit the blanket in a single plain yarn so I chose to do the blanket in three colours of Jo Sharp Silk Road Aran:

As I got into the body of the blanket I realised that I had a bit of a tension problem with my purl rows being looser than my knit. The result being that the intarisa on the side joins was lovely, but the central intarsia join was loose. This meant I had to spread the slack from the first stitch in the new colour for each and every row. Here is the centre join post fix, still not great:

It was a bit of a pain, but what really scared me was reversing the pattern when I got to the centre of the blanket. I was also hating the needles I had purchased at my LYS (nice yarn, crap needles) and the centre line of the blanket seemed like a good place to switch to nicer once. So with the midpoint looming I ordered my first pair of addis and waited patiently for this moment:

I changed my needles and I (very happily) knit on, hoping for the best. Six rows in I found that I had forgotten to knit the entire first row of the colour change and now had a yarn join line on the wrong side of the blanket. I had to rip it out. Six rows was quite enough to prove my tension fears were well founded. The second half of the blanket had a nice firm centre seam and the edges had gone all sloppy. Ripping it out once made me brave and on the advice of Alsion I changed my knitting style. I LOVE combined knitting! I was a little obsessed with checking for gauge changes but it all seemed fine:

Without further ado I knit my way to the end of the body of the blanket. With only the final edge to go I sat back to admire (and photograph) my work and - DISASTER!

The squares really are very similar, any differences will block out I am sure… the edging on the other hand is 30% smaller at the top than the bottom. Ooops! check out the cinching in the top half in particular:

The problem started when I changed balls on the edge colour a few inches into the body. I got panicky about getting a loose stitch on the edge and started deliberately increasing the tension on the edges - tighter and Tighter and TIGHTER - more and more worried about that edge stitch by the looks of things.

Stay tuned for the story of my crazy repair job!

This is my very first blog post, ever. how exciting. This blog is also my first web project in a long, long time. Even more exciting. And this blog is going to be about my new obsession - knitting. I am really excited. can you tell?

On the topic of excitement I am officially growing a little stash of my very own. I got goodies in the post today, two back issues of interweave knits and yummy yarn for an Isabelle sized cardy.

This forms my infant stash, this and the lovely redness I purchased during a visit to the dentist on the weekend (no really, we honestly did drive all that way to get to the dentist, it wasn’t the lure of lovely yarn or the amazing gourmet deli at all). Of course now that we KNOW about the fantastic bread at the afore-mentioned amazing deli across the road from the yarn store that turned out to be worth the LONG drive we won’t be waiting for another dentist appointment to make a return visit. So back to that redness:

This is destined to become the jacket on the front cover of Phildar Layette 5. A gift for a cousin’s 2nd babe, due this christmas.