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.

Gnoming like there's no tomorrow

I usually knit clothes. You know, knits with a clear purpose that get lots of use. I've crocheted a couple toys but generally, I don't knit toys or decorative items. But it seems that when I do, I go for it whole-heartedly.

What: Here we gnome again / Sarah Schira

How: Circular needles 3.5 and 3.75 mm

From: Scrap yarns, 118 g

A year ago, I participated in the Indie Design Gift-A-long for the first time and everyone was crazy about these gnomes. I didn't really care for them myself. Who needs a knitted gnome?

But you know how it goes. You look at something long enough and it starts to make sense. Actually, this new even prettier gnome design had me waiting for Christmas eagerly as this time I intended to hop on the gnome train.

I started out with a traditional red gnome. I found a lovely rustic alpaca blend in red and oatmeal color in my leftover yarn stash. For such a small knit there was an awful lot of knitting to be done. It starts off with the cap and once that's finished, you pick up stitches below the brim to work the body. Finally, you knit a beard in the contrast color and i-cords for the hands. These are both sewn into place.

The gnome isn't very big but both the cap and body have cables all over them which meant I had to stare at the work and the charts constantly. That's what made it feel like a handful.

However, the project was every bit worth of the trouble. The finished gnome is so cute I can't even. It didn't look like anything before the beard but once that is sewn on the gnome wakes up instantly. I had a hard time letting go of the first gnome but I did end up gifting it to my dad.

The second gnome felt a lot easier and the third one flew off the needles in two days and felt like a breeze already. I still have plenty of scrap yarns so I think there might be a lot more gnomes next Christmas.

The gnomes were filled with polyester. It was also suggested to use some pellets to help the gnome from falling. For the first gnome, I didn't have the energy go searching for polyester pellets at a hobby store so that one is a bit too light and tends to fall. For the other two, I realized I could use something we already have at home and filled an old sock with rice. That seemed to work very well.

In my childhood, one of the most magical moments every Christmas was the getting out all the Christmas decorations. My mom's great uncle had made her some wooden elves each with their own personalities and activites. Some were holding notes for Christmas carols, others were skiing etc. And my grandma had an even bigger collection of those elves. It was such great fun going through the elves and seeing what each of them was doing. I wanted to relive my childhood and needed to come up with some different activities for our gnomes as well.

I had seen more than one cute knitting gnome in the Gift-A-long group on Ravelry so that was a no brainer. It would have been easy to knit a little scarf beginning with my 2.0 mm needles and then just slip the stitches onto toothpicks. But I'm not in the habit of letting myself easy so I actually knitted this little garter stitch piece with the toothpicks and I wouldn't recommend that to anyone. The toothpicks stuck to the yarn and were a pain in many other ways as well. But hey, my gnome has an authentic knit in his hands!

I had to come up with something else for the second gnome. Our local newspaper had just the right size columns so I made him his own newspaper with a report from the police. He looks like a detective or a spy himself, don't you think?