Where to draw the line between a shawl and a blanket?

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.

Shawl + cardigan = blanket

You know the saying swirling around the internet?

Knitting is like sex. If I like you and

you appreciate it, its free. 

Other than that, you can't pay me enough.

That is so true. I mostly knit for myself but sometimes I come across something that looks like a fun knit and it's screaming the name of someone I know. If that lucky someone appreciates my little knitted gifts with some appropriate whooping, they might just be in for more knitted gifts.

What: Morvach / Lucy Hague

How: Circular needle 4.0 mm

From: Drops Baby Merino, 227 g

I've long been admiring the intricate cables on Lucy Hagues Morvarch shawl - except that it's not a shawl I would use. Instead, I know someone who loves all thing celtic and any fantasy inspired stuff. When I heard, this person was expecting a baby, I came up with a plan.

Yes, Morvarch is indeed a shawl pattern designed for lace weight yarn. But there's miles and miles of boring stockinette stitch in the shawl and actually everything interesting happens right in the beginning in the center of the shawl. I figured, using heavier yarn, this shawl pattern could be turned into a baby blanket by knitting just the center square of the shawl. And I wasn't wrong.

Few years back I bought beige Drops Baby Merino from the clearence sale of my LYS. The color didn't speak to me so it was headed for the dye pot. My lovely dyeing guru friend insists that I dyed this yarn - though in my memories, I mainly stood by the pot and said green would be great.

The shawl - or in this case, the blanket - starts at the center. It begins with some garter stitch with magical cables on top of it. Once the first cables are done, the rest of the square is shaped with short rows. That way the direction of knitting can be altered and the corners are knitted with stockinette stitch with more magic cables. After this, I threw the rest of the pattern out.

By this time, the blanket wasn't big enough so I decided on a garter stitch edge. At this point I remembered seeing a blanket with garter stitch edging and cables in the corners that would be a perfect fit for this baby blanket as well. Annoyingly, you couldn't by just the blanket pattern but had to purchase an entire e-book to get it. I didn't feel like spending so much on the mere blanket corners. Luckily, I remembered that I actually own one pattern from the e-book that uses similar cables and figured, I could probably just modify that chart to work with my project.

Turning the shawl pattern to a blanket was easy. All I had to do, was stop at the right time. Instead, modifying a baby cardigan yoke chart to work with the corners of my garter stitch edge, wasn't all that painless. I kept saying to myself how good it is I'm knitting the entire edge all at once so I won't have to remember how I worked the corners. I made the corner cables approximately as in the yoke chart. On every other round I increased one stitch on each side of the cable to make the corners corner shaped.

Once I had finished the cables, I bound off the edge like this: *k2tog tbl, move the st back onto the left needle*, repeat *-*. This way the bind off edge was elastic enough for easy blocking.

I almost forgot the most important bit! The magic cables. From the shawl pattern, I learned an easy yet incredible trick to make cables that start from nothing and end nowhere. Or can you tell where the cables starter and ended? I thought so! Once I learned the trick, I used it in the corner cables as well. I also picked up a trick for making almost horizontal cables without them putting a strain on the garment. I would say the designer has been sharpening her technique for quite some time. Wow. Just wow.

But perhaps next something a bit more relaxed knitting? Yeah right...