Heart Blanket

I'm making progress on my heart blanket. I'm actually a little under halfway which is pretty suprising! I'm sorry, the photo is a little blurry but you can see how it's going. You can see that on the row of stitches where the check colours change over, (ie between the first row of checks and the second) I just swapped over yarn and of course the two colours show in the one row every second stitch because I'm doing moss (seed) stitch and I wasn't 100% happy with that effect.


I fiddled with varying combinations of knit rows in between etc but nothing worked so I thought " ... oh well its not that bad..." and kept going. By the time I got to the second row join Ailsa, my knitting neighbour, had planted the seed of casting off and picking up the stitches - OF COURSE!! Why didnt I think of that?? So of course I did a swatch and checked it out and yep I was happy. (I'm not going to show that swatch becasue certain people snigger when I write about swatches - you know who you are) The stitch picking up is MUCH better thanks AIlsa! so I'm going to keep going then work out how to fix the first join later. Here's the back. I'm really pleased with how neat the intarsia is on the back and the 'pick up stitches' join is also really neat.


It will be very tidy when blocked! Of course I could have just knitted a heap of little squares then seamed them but I really wanted to go without seams because I wanted it to be as neat on the back as possible. I suppose there's other techniques I could have used to knit it all in one piece but there's nothing like just winging it and working out the method as you go. Now after my extensive calculations I really hope I have enough yarn! eeeek!!

In other news I'm reading Jane Austen's Sense and Sensibility again, I read it years ago and I'm really enjoying it! The poor Miss Dashwoods are not having a good time of it at the moment. I'm on a mission to read all of Jane Austen's ouvre through from start to finish during this year. Dont ask me why - the idea just popped on to my head.

Too late....time for bed...yawn....My mum comes back from 6 weeks in the UK next week - I hope she brings me some Liberty tana lawn and some Rowan summer tweed but since I didnt ask her to I don't suppose I have much chance....

Goodnight sweet knitting dreams to you all :-)