Blanket machine

The weekend before last, I had a long drive to take on Saturday, going up to Parksville to sing some Russian & Ukrainian liturgical music with Voces Intimae.  It was a dreary day for a 3-hour drive, so I cast on some knitting.  I bought the yarn for this blanket at the same time as my Op Art – we were on a bit of a hope-chest binge that evening.  Amusingly, I had toyed with the idea of doing Op Art in red and black, but decided that a) it would be a bit too gothy/emo (not that I’m averse to that, but…red and black spirally vortex of doom?  Too 14-year-old me for my liking) and b) because of the doubled knitting, it would have been pretty pricey in the yarn I was looking at (Bernat Satin, my favourite acrylic).  So first, my sister saw my Op Art and decided to cast on her own…in red and black!  Then, while I was knitting this blanket, I ran out of yarn…probably because I had used some to knit G some slippers, imagining that I’d be “close enough” to the correct yardage, ha ha.  I ransacked my stash looking for an appropriate yarn to finish the darn thing with and came up with…sparkly black (Patons Brilliant).  Gothy?  Maybe.  But it’s finished!  And it’s so pretty!  And it took less than 2 weeks (a big improvement from around a year for Op Art)!

This will probably be the one and only piece of lace I ever knit in acrylic.  It’s not so blockable, although don’t believe anyone who tells you it’s impossible.   I had heard of “killing” acrylic with steam; it was this tutorial that informed me it was possible to steam-block without destroying any elasticity the yarn has, and I think I succeeded reasonably well.  What I did was pin the blanket out square on my blocking mats, soak a large towel, and get out my iron.  I laid the towel over my knitting and passed the iron along it, just touching the towel without pressing at all.  If my iron did a better job with steam on its own, I would probably have wrung out the towel more thoroughly (it was really wet), because the weight of it pressing down did flatten my cables a little.  But the lace is open enough to see properly, so I’m satisfied!  Natural fibres in the future, though.

Hey, this is my 6th FO on my 11-in-11 list!  More than halfway, hooray!