Category — Knitting

Today I’ve got two surprises for you:

1-a picture of my log cabin blanket. It’s going quite well, almost 2.25′ square now, which is great!

2-my birthday present arrived today: an iPod nano. Although my birthday’s not for another two weeks, but I did have to open the package to make sure everything was in the box.

While I’m enjoying knitting up my log cabin blankie, I must tell you, it’s getting a tad painful. That is, as each row is well over 100 stitches now, it takes longer to do each one, and the repetitive motion of the knit stitch is getting to me. Each long is taking me over 90 minutes now, which is crazy! So no more two logs per night now, as that’s just impossible. I have to stop after one, just to give my poor wrists & fingers a rest. And I’ve even had to attach all the cords from my Denise kit to keep up with the length! Impressive. How do you all deal with that? Do you use impossibly long needles? And how is it to knit with really long ones? I’m curious. I like the Denise kit because the cords are pliable, so it my project sits better in my lap, but I know not everyone uses circulars, so I’m curious. (Although I’ve had to put on the stoppers on the ends of the cords to create “soft” needles because I couldn’t deal with the circular ones and the amount of knit yarn in my lap.)

So the log cabin blanket is growing and growing. I’m now into rows of roughly 115 stitches, which means it takes me almost an hour to do 9 ridges. So much for squeezing in a quick log or two in between my tv shows and dinner.

The stats:

• Over 115 stitches per row
• 9 garter ridges per log
• The blanket is approximately 24″ by 26″, which is great! (it’s not quite square as I have problems picking up the same number of stitches for each log. )
• Over an hour per log to knit, including the bind off row.

Phew, that’s a lot of logs! But I’m getting better at picking up the stitches, which makes things easier. I also undid my circulars as it was just getting to be waaaay too difficult to handle. Now it’s much easier to knit as I deal with each half alone. Although I’m glad I’m not using pole needles, because this way I can knit more in front of me. I think if I was using the traditional needles, it would be more difficult because they’d have to be longer, which would cause me to hold my knitting out further, which would cause me to strain my neck or back or something. Who knew that knitting could be so dangerous?

All right everyone, I finally got around to taking photos of my log cabin blanket. Check it out!

And:

It’s about 2 feet wide now, which is great, and is nice and warm as I knit. As you can see, I stopped using the gray, as I didn’t like the way it meshed with the rest of the logs. I might use it as a border at the end, but I haven’t decided. There’s also the odd dropped stitch here and there, but that just adds character. I’m quite pleased with it.

So I was all excited at the prospect of knitting over my lunch hour today at work. I pulled out a big Ziploc bag to store my goodies: yarn, UFO, row counter. I thought I was all set to go. I even frogged back my one strip that I didn’t like, and I was all set to use the “right” way of picking up stitches and everything. See my desk at work? I was all set!

Until I went to pick up the needles. Uh, needles? Where are you?

Son of a…! Rick’em frak’em!

Nope, they weren’t in the Ziploc bag with everything else. *sigh* They must be still sitting on the couch at home. I even brought a crochet needle with me to aid in the picking up of stitches, but alas, no knitting will be done by me today at lunch. I’m quite sad about that. *double sigh*