blanket for tom
As I mentioned before here, my uncle has recently been diagnosed with cancer. It's a non-Hodgkins lymphoma which can be treated with chemotherapy. He has spent the past several weeks in a rehab center in physical therapy for some damage caused by a tumor wrapped around his spinal cord and has received two chemo treatments so far. All things considered, he is doing well and everyone is optimistic.
I am too far away to visit him and offer the family my support, so I knit him a blanket.
It started out a little differently. I had an EZ design all picked out, but as you may recall, after knitting about half of it, I realized the pieces didn't quite fit as they should, and the blanket was turning out to be way too big.
My choices were to start over or modify. I decided to modify. Instead of the oh-so-clever EZ design with interlocking strips of bulky garter stitch with all kinds of turned corners, I rearranged my pieces into a square-shaped border and knit a smaller square on the diagonal to fill in the middle section.
I sewed up the border pieces with a darning needle, then used a single crochet to attach the middle square to the outer border.
I finished up with an i-cord border.
I'm pretty happy with the result.
It's about 45"x45" and very warm and cozy.
The only issue is that the garter sections are very stretchy, whereas the crochet seam and i-cord edging are not stretchy, so if you move the blanket around too much, it kind of puckers and looks like it doesn't fit together very well. I think that's just the nature of the fabric, though.
And hopefully Tom will like it. He'll get it in time for his next round of chemo, at least. After that he'll be halfway through.
Pattern: Sheepsdown garter stitch blanket by EZ (found in The Opinionated Knitter)
Yarn: Northampton Bulky from WEBS, 18 skeins (11 from stash, had to order more to finish it)
Mods: I used the original pieces for a border and knit a square to fit in the middle. Otherwise the blanket would have been too big.
Comments