Laying out the Birthday Blanket

I set myself a target to complete the Birthday Blanket during our time here in Grenoble, and in this post I had only thirty-nine days to finish the knitting of 46 more squares! I'd like to announce that I've managed this; all 121 squares for the blanket are finished, hooray!

This is them, all of them:

You'll notice in this picture that the cream coloured squares aren't yet blocked. 

So, I figured I'd best lay out this blanket just to check that it looked good in its final design still (although I don't really know what I'd have done if it didn't...)

This is the blanket in the configuration that I drew out on paper

But, as I'd already suspected, the top left quarter was looking a little dark with the brown and purple squares. I therefore swapped out the purple ring from that quarter for the red ring in the bottom right corner, and we had this ...

More balanced, don't you think?

Now I just need to sew all 121 squares together ... not sure that'll get done before we go back to England, but at least all the knitting is done! (...other than the border which will be done at some point, but shhh)

Full Steam Ahead

There are five and a half weeks, or thirty-nine(!) days, until we leave France. That's not very many. It's also really not very many considering I said I'd make the Birthday Blanket while we were here. That gives me thirty-nine days to finish it! 

So, how am I getting on you ask? 

Well, there are 121 squares to be made in the blanket, this picture shows the ones that are finished, blocked and everything:

There are 60.

Then there are 15 more squares being blocked:

Making 75 squares.

Which means I still have 46 squares to knit ... did I mention there were 39 days?!

Best get cracking I guess ...

Adventures into blocking

I learned to knit when I was a child, I don't remember how old exactly, but probably somewhere between 7 and 11. Then I did a little knitting at 17 as part of a school textiles project before putting down my needles until three years ago when I started knitting 'properly'.

I have, however, never blocked anything. 

But, with the Birthday Blanket being my main knitting project (currently, at least) I thought it important that it was done right, which means learning how to block!

This was today's task:

First, I made a 15cm square template out of card to make a masking-tape grid on the bed. I figured this would make it easier to make sure the squares were all blocked to the same size, and I'd be able to reuse the grid as many times as I needed to get all the squares blocked (there are currently 65 knitted).

I then ran some lukewarm water in the bathroom sink, and put in two squares (I wanted to start small).

After letting them soak for 25 minutes, I took the squares out of the water, squeezed as much as I could out of them and then rolled them in a towel.

Then, I blocked them onto the bed, using my grid :)

This all seemed to go fine, so I put more squares in to soak and repeated the process in small batches until I ran out of pins. 

Apparently I can block 15 squares at once.

Now, just to let them dry so that the other squares can get blocked!