Hemlock
Posted in Projects in Progress on February 11th, 2010Last month, rather than tackle any of the numerous projects lurking around the house that need to be completed–a post for another day–I began the Hemlock Ring Blanket (chart on the Rainey Sisters blog). I’ve been attracted to this lovely blanket since I first saw Jared Flood’s version back in 2007, but not being a big blanket knitter, I needed a suitable excuse to make it. When my brother and his partner of many years got married last September, it came to mind as the perfect wedding gift.
Though I’m not doing anything original here–just following the pattern, using the specified Cascade Eco Wool–I am finding the process of making the blanket very satisfying. It was fun to zoom through the central motif, watching the leaves take shape. Once you get through that part of the pattern, you just alternate four rows of knitting round and round and round with one row with clusters of decreases and bunches of yarnovers. Easy peasy, and the result is beautiful. I’m only managing a row or so a day, but given how little I’ve been able to knit this past year, any progress is welcome.
The only trouble I have run into is with the needles. I was using Denise interchangeables, since I happen to have a 52-inch cord for those, but I was really loathing having to keep scootching the stitches around the cable several times per row in order to get them onto the needle to knit. Not only do I dislike the act of pausing to scootch and the scootching itself, but if I don’t scootch carefully, sometimes the needle detaches from the cable, dropping a whole bunch of stitches and making me batty. I decided to abandon the Denise needles and buy some longer cables for my KnitPicks Harmony needles, which have a much skinnier cable and don’t generally require scootching. I made the switch last night. Here’s hoping that the amount of scootching I have to do is dramatically reduced.





























