Nowadays, knitting shawls is all about size. A good shawl is big enough to wrap around you a couple hundred times, and it takes at least three skeins of yarn. And I too am very much into shlankets.
What: Elevate / Susanne Sommer
How: Circular needle 4.5 mm
From: Tukuwool Fingering, 735 g
Issue 5 of Laine magazine had Susanne Sommer's rectangular shawl which combined some of my favorite things: garter stitch and two-color brioche. I took one look at that huge shawl design and decided on that instance that it could easily be modified into a blanket for our sofa.
Right away, I knew I wanted to knit this blanket in Tukuwool. It's so wonderfully woolly, and very affordable for a blanket project. Because a blanket will eat up some serious amounts of yarn. I pondered for a moment for the perfect color combo for our living room and ended up choosing my favorite Tuku color, Ruura. I already had a decent amount of it in my stash which was a big plus. It needed a partner in crime so I bought six skeins of the fox colored Repo. I also had a few skeins of Repo at home but still ran out of yarn.
The shawl design was huge as it was but I wanted a decent-size blanket for two adults. My first modification was choosing bigger needles. The shawl - or blanket in my case - starts at one corner with increases next to the brioche edge. I did a couple extra increases before moving onto the brioche prallelograms at the center of the blanket.
The blanket has five parallelograms at the center with every other of them with the colors flipped. I found a note on my phone that I added a few repeats to the smaller parallelograms but it seems I forgot to do the same for the bigger ones. Hence, the size difference is quite small. Oh well, these mods were plenty enough to turn this shawl into a big blanket.
I started the project in August. In the beginning it grew fast as I was eager to get on with this new project and learn something new. Thing slowed down after the first few parallelograms. Finally, at Christmas I took a little break from designing and decided it was about time to finish the blanket. Oh, how happy I was once I finished the last parallelogram and thought the rest would go fast. It turns out that if you happen to have hundreds of stitches on your needles and only decrease two on every other row it might take some time.
In the beginning of January I took the blanket along as car knitting on our way to Helsinki and I finally got to decrease the last couple of stitches. I took out the magazine just to check how to bind off the last stitches... only to notice for the very first time that there was an i-cord bind off around the blanket still to be worked! How long did that take, you ask? Let's not even go there. The important thing is that the blanket is now done and I love it.
So be it that there was a whole lot more knitting than I anticipated. But now the blanket is finished - and it actually came together rather quickly. I lovelovelove it. I didn't measure the blanket but let me tell you it's more than enough for two adults lying on our couch. No more fighting over one blanket.
If I every once in a while would like to skip blocking, this one really needed it. The brioche edge has such a different gauge than the garter stitch part that the edges really needed to be blocked properly. Our foyer was just big enough to fit the blanket on the floor to dry.
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