Baby, It's Cold Outside!

Well, no, it's actually not. Not at all. This is the first warm, sunny day we've had in a while. But the title seemed apt for this post.

Since April, I've been working on a surprise present for a pregnant co-worker. This thing got shoved under the bed and forgotten about after we moved in May, and I very recently realized that while the blanket was not even halfway done, the baby was more than halfway done! This has led to some frantic weeks of knitting, but, amazingly, I got the thing done before the baby got here.

Of course, in the moving process, you lose everything, especially if you haven't really unpacked any of it yet, and in my case, that means I couldn't find a single yarn needle to weave my ends in with. I also couldn't find my interchangeable needle set or my crochet hooks, both cases which I knew contained yarn needles. So I had to go out and buy some more, upping my yarn needle count to something like 20,000 or so.

Last night hubs and I went to the laundromat to wash the blanket. I was terrified. I've hand-washed knitted items before, but never machine-washed any. However, I knew the item needed to be cleaned, and if it was going to fall apart after all my hard work, it might as well happen to me. However, my knitting apparently doesn't suck and it came out just fine.



I took some not-awesome pics last night since I knew I had to wrap it up and give it today, otherwise I would have tried harder. But hey, it shows the blanket. It didn't suck. And the recipients didn't seem to hate it, either. :)

Pattern: Reversible Basketweave Blanket by Chrissy O'Malley of Yellow House Designs
Modifications: None. I followed this pattern pretty much to the letter, including number of basketweave repeats: 17.
Needles: Boye interchangeable set, size 5 (I knit loosely)
Yarn: Lion Brand Cotton-Ease, color stone, a little over 3 skeins. I joined new yarn at the edges of rows and ran out of my third skein with five finishing rows of seed stitch to go.

Opinion: This made a very nice blanket. I had some issues with the pattern, but that's because my brain was not at a problem-solving stage at that point, and I can rely blindly on a pattern even when it doesn't make sense to me. The yarn felt nice and washability was the biggest draw for me. I think it washed and dried very well. I would make this pattern again.