Knitting the Knitter's Almanac - April

I know, I know, it's December and I'm posting about the April project from the Knitter's Almanac.  Clearly, I'm not making it through the book in only one year. . .

April's project is an afghan, specifically designed to mask it's construction techniques, which I'm going to reveal here anyway.  The design is similar to the "Granny Square" assembly popular with old fashioned (and newer designs as well I suppose) crocheted afghans and blankets.  Basically a number of identical or similar squares are made, joined and a border worked.  This type of blanket is not my favorite in crochet, and it has the same drawbacks when knit.  Knitting the squares is quick, easy and enjoyable, though making them the same can sometimes pose a problem.  However, after you have enough squares, these must be joined, a tedious project, and then a myriad of ends must be woven in to finish the problem.  Think about it, assuming you can knit a square with one skein, or a portion of one skein, of yarn, you have two ends (the start and stop) for each square.  Some of these ends can be worked in while working the project; for example, I always knit or crochet in my start end by knitting with the regular yarn and the end until the end is used up.  And you can use the other end for part or all of the joining work, if you've left a long enough tail, but there will inevitably be ends that can't be worked in this way, that will have to be woven in after, a task I hate doing and which delays my final completion of many projects.

For this blanket, I purchased ten skeins of a recycled wool (which I partly chose because of its cost per linear yard), and vowed that I would make the blanket so I did not have to purchase additional yarn.  Initially I had hoped to be able to knit 54 squares to create a 6x9 ratio, however, it quickly became apparent that I was not getting 5.4 squares out of a single skein of yarn, and knowing that I would need additional yarn for connecting the squares and making the border, I decreased my square goal to 48, for a 6x8 ratio.  At first I joined the squares as I went, but it became clear that I would actually conserve yarn if I did all the weaving at the end, so I stopped doing that after only nine squares were joined.

The squares are knit in a pretty simple manner, they are worked in the round from the inside out with 4 evenly spaced increases to create a square.  This is the same basic pattern as the baby blanket from February.  When knitting from the center out, you must start with a very small number of stitches which cannot be worked on a circular needle, but must be worked on four smaller straight needles, called double pointed needles or dpn for short.  While I have worked with dpn before, usually it has been at the other end of the project, namely as I worked inward from the outside, decreasing instead of increasing.  Since in that direction you have the entire weight of an almost finished project, it is somewhat easier to manipulate and use the needles.  Dropped stitches, a common problem with dpn, since they do not have any stops on the ends, can be seen and picked up easily.  However, when starting a project this way, dropped stitches are harder to identify and reclaim, and it's ends up being easier to just pull everything off and start over.  Additionally, because you're just starting the pattern, it's much easier for the needles to get twisted and you end up knitting some weird formation instead of the circle you were aiming for.  I had all of these problems with the first few squares, but 48 squares means a lot of practice.  I feel I'm practically an expert at starting projects on dpn at this point.  Once I worked out the kinks of working with dpn, the squares were pretty easy mindless work, though I did have to make sure the row count was accurate so the squares came out uniform in size.



Early attempt at weaving -
note the raised area to the right side
not particularly invisible

Later weaving -
much more difficult to see the join

Once all the squares were finished, I faced the daunting task of joining them.  For this Ms. Zimmermann suggests weaving, a technique I learned back in February, but had not perfected.  Again, after 82 woven joins, I'm practically an expert now.  The advantage of weaving, and the reason EZ suggests it, is that it looks like knitting.  Since one of the reasons for the design of this blanket was to fool the eye, the weaving makes it difficult to tell that the seams are such, so it's not clear where one square ends and the next begins.  You can see the progress in my weaving ability by comparing my earlier woven joins with later ones. 



Close up of a portion of the blanket
showing the larger square, the joins
and the smaller corner squares.

To further fool the eye, the corner five stitches of each square are not joined by weaving, instead they are picked up along with the three neighboring squares' corners and knit together in a miniature square.  This was useful because I was able to pick up all the ends from the weaving and work them into the project, but knitting with four tiny strands and a main strand of yarn wasn't particularly easy or enjoyable.  I found I liked the weaving much more than knitting these tiny squares.  Once I had worked and joined the squares, it was time for the border.  Unfortunately, despite my best laid plans I ran out of yarn.  I swear I'm cursed.  So more had to be purchased to do the border, a plain garter stitch one, but with an interesting method of mitering the corners, that I can see myself using again.  After all the work was done, I faced the dreaded task mentioned above of weaving in ends.  This project has actually been done for a month except for that final step.  I knitted several other things (moving on to May and June) before I finally told myself I could not start a new project until I finished this one.

I'd like to say that after dreading the task, it was far easier than I feared, something I find happens a lot with things one dreads to tackle.  But no, it took me several hours to weave in all those ends and create a finished blanket.  However, all that weaving practice earlier paid off.  In addition to getting good at joining using weaving, the process helped me to fully understand the path the yarn takes when knit, making weaving in the ends far easier, and hopefully more secure.



Finished blanket, very large.

The finished piece is very large and I think it is quite attractive.  I've seen some examples on line where people knit the squares in multiple colors or left over yarn, and I think this construction looks good pretty much every way it's been done.  I could see myself doing a blanket like this again, though maybe not quite so large, though I'll admit, the thought of all those ends to weave might well discourage me.