20 Mar 2015

Vasarely inspired 'building blocks' baby blanket finished



This was truly a labor of love! It took 'forever' to knit this blanket on size 3 needles! Then again, it took forever to was and block it but now it is ready to use! I'm not complaining, started to knit merely 3 weeks before our little guy was born, so that's why it really took so long to finish.
I used drops Karisma yarn, just like for the other blanket I've made. It is a superwash treated yarn. After blocking the blanket grew slightly in size, but this is just because of flattening the 3d pattern. You can see below how 'wobbly' it is before blocking, due to the knit/purl stitches next to each other:


pattern: 
Again, it is a pattern consisting my favorite combination: only knit and purl stitches and it is surprisingly easy to memorize though it looks quite intricate with the 3-d blocks which remind me of the work of Victor Vasarely:


The pattern is available through Ravelry (click here) though I must say I figured it out myself, just by looking at pictures and counting stitches. After drawing a pattern chart I decided that it wouldn't be easy to keep track on it while knitting. I wrote the stitches down and then knitted a sample. While knitting made the necessary corrections and now have the pattern to work with!


material & sizing:


The yarn I used is the drops 'Karisma'. It is a 4-strands, sport weight, superwash-treated, 100% wool yarn. It comes in a lot of different colors. I choose a dark, greyish-blue hue: nr.65 'denim blue' which is not so baby-ish anymore.
I used 10 skeins of 50g (strangely my blanket weighs 525 g)
I always use smaller needles than recommended to prevent stretching after blocking and have no issues with 'growing' items after washing.
Using metric size 3.5 needles my gauge is 21 sts per 10 cm.
Size after washing/blocking approx. 90x100 cm
I haven't waisted more than a meter of the yarn. What I did was marking the beginning of a skein and the end of a skein with a piece of contrasting color wool at one side. This helped me to estimate where to start knitting the finishing edge pattern.

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