Trickle Trickle

Our normal mail carrier is a heavyset guy in his 50s, who usually shows up some time late in the day - between 3 and 5. He seems nice enough, always smiles at me and the girls if we're outside without giving any creepy, raising of hackles sensation. Our neighbor down the street likes to complain about him because he carries the mail under his arm sometimes, and if it's warm out he gets a bit sweaty. Apparently the magazines are always showing up at their house stinky and wet. Ew. You can imagine my surprise when I was sitting on the living room floor playing with Julie and Sophie and knitting on the blankie at only 11 this morning and I looked up to see the mail being dropped off. This happens sometimes. The older guy doesn't work every day, and when someone a bit more spry takes over, the mail comes early.

Well, I hopped right up mid-row and ran to open the door. Along with a bunch of junk mail were Two interesting-looking packages addressed to me. I love getting mail. Not the advertisements or the bills - real, live mail that human hands addressed personally to me. I plopped right back down where I started and opened them up in the blink of an eye. It felt like Christmas morning. This is what it looked like:



I opened the white box first, and found a beautiful collection of leftovers not unlike my own. In fact, at least three of the balls are exactly the same as ones I'm already including in the current blanket. She also included some lovely merino handpaints, and some sport weight bits as well. I love it that some of the balls are center-pulls obviously wrapped on a nostepinne. Okay, and to top it off - the package included a pretty little card that matched the tissue paper lining the box. Oh, and it smells good too. Now I can start to understand more fully why people love That Laurie. These are her yarns. Or they were till now bwahahaha...



Next I opened the brown padded envelope with the Disney stamps on the corner to find three more lovely yarns. Two of them look like maybe they're sport weight, but the primary-color with grey fleck stripes will be just fine in the current blanket. This package came from Julie H. in Warrenville, IL.



Thanks so much for sharing your scraps with me Laurie and Julie. I'm looking forward to playing with *all* of them, but for today I chose one from each batch and added them to my blanket. That big black and blue square is from Laurie's stash, and the smaller red, black and teal one to its right is from Julie's. I've got another block from that same yarn on the needles now.



I decided it was time to go ahead and move this project into a slightly bigger basket, and here you can see how it's looking right now. I'm still madly in love with it. I think it would be great if I could get at least one square knit from each package the day it arrives like I did today, but I have a feeling that this was the trickle through the crack right before the dam breaks. Tomorrow will probably be another trickle, and I'm thinking next week the deluge is coming. I promise that I will do my very best to at least take pictures and post them each day as the yarn comes in. I'm still trying to decide how and when to start sorting the yarn. Should I keep it with the packages for now? Should I go ahead and make piles by fiber and weight (as the organizer in me is begging to do)? I'm not sure.



Several people have asked me where I got the idea for this blanket, or whether it is my own design. The answer is yes, as much as a simple mitered-square blanket like this can be any one person's design, this one is mine. Where did the idea come from?

Well, Ann and Kay have been mitering for the last year or two, just in a slightly different way. They like to make their blocks all seperate and sew them up at the end. I really don't care for sewing things up any more than I have to, so while I love their results that process didn't appeal to me so much. Although, I just popped over to their site so I could cut-and-paste the URL, and it looks like Kay's been picking up stitches for her latest dishrag, and now that I think about it more, their log cabin blankets are all done in one piece too.

I've looked at several different books on modular knitting, including Modular Knits by Iris Schreier; Module Magic by Ginger Luters; and Domino Knitting by Vivian Høxbro, among others. I also took a class on entrelac at this year's Yarnover event hosted by the Minnesota Knitters' Guild. This project isn't exactly entrelac, but it does have a lot in common with it.

So I had a lot of modular ideas floating around in my brain. I finished up a bunch of socks recently, and was putting away the scraps in the (overflowing) bin of other scraps, and wondered what I would ever do with them all and should I just get rid of them. So like all the other knitters out there, I just stuck the thing back in the closet to think about later. But that night as I was falling asleep, this blanket popped into my head. The next morning I could hardly wait to start sorting yarn. The skills and other information necessary to make this design were pretty much already in my head, so I just started cranking away. That's how I ended up with the beginnings of a blanket and not enough yarn.

Someone named Dee asked me a question about making the blanket a different way, but didn't leave me an e-mail address to which I can respond. So I'll just say here that I'm making this blanket only one of the bajillion ways that it could be made. The possibilities are endless, and therein lies the joy of knitting. The cool thing here is that we're using scrap yarn, so go ahead and give your idea a whirl. Worst case scenario is that you don't like what you're doing and you either rip it out, shove it back in the closet to hide for a few more years, or burn the damned thing. But you just might come up with something fun and wonderful too.

Okay, I have enough time to go play with my yarn a bit more before bed, but tomorrow I think I'll share my thoughts on weaving in all those ends.