Night of the Living Ends: A Tale of Two Blankets

I've got to edit some photos before I can talk about last weekend, so instead we're hopping into my handy time machine to...uh, last week, or whenever it was I finally finished the last couple of projects.

So I've had a couple of small blankets that have been getting occasional attention in between other projects. The first one was a variation on the Baby Blanket Moderne pattern, which I started to use up a lot of odds and ends of baby yarn.


I'm happy to have done it, it's cleared out a lot of leftover yarn bits. All other things being equal, though, I don't think I'll do this pattern again in garter stitch. It does make a nice cushy thick blanket, but the boredom factor was pretty high. I started this over a year ago, and if wasn't for DVDs, it still wouldn't be finished. Also, doing this as a scrap blanket would have been easier if all my yarn had been the same weight. Some of it was so fine I doubled it, other yarns I used singly- the variation in thickness of the different sections of the blanket is noticeable. When I got to the end, I wanted a border that was all the same color, and yet I wanted to use up that last ball of yellow, so I switched to crochet, and did a half-double-crochet border until I ran out of yarn.

I like the second blanket a lot better:


This was made mostly from gift yarn (the white). I liked the way it looked in pattern (this is my all-double-crochet blanket), but I thought that just a little contrast would liven up the design. So I found some navy blue that was a perfect match for weight (see? learning behavior!) and threw in an occasional navy stripe. I thought it made for an understated and dignified blanket.

Of course there were ends to be woven in. You kind of expect that with blankets. But the combination of the scrap yarn for the Moderne, and 96-yard skeins (I ask you, who in their right mind makes bulky weight yarn in 96 yard skeins?!) did make for a lot of ends. Between the ubiquitous ends and the belated arrival of summery weather, all through July, I'd pick up these blankets, weave in a few ends, say, 'it's too warm for blankets' (er, that wasn't necessarily true- usually it was too boring for weaving in ends) and then go back to a nice sock. But. Even blankets eventually come to an end--and so does this post.