A Year and a Quarter Later

It seemed in September 2022 like something I could knit on the machine with plenty of time to spare before my younger daughter’s birthday in late November. It was a blanket design by Nicky Epstein that I saw once in my friends’ activity on Ravelry, made up of garter stitch squares in different colors, sewn together after all the squares were knitted, with a flower-shaped appliqué sewn onto the center of each square, and fringed at two edges with a different color for each abutting square. The original design was beautiful, but every step of the process seemed like pure mind-rotting tedium. That’s why God created knitting machines, right? To expedite repetitive hand-knitting maneuvers.

Of course, some repetitive hand-knitting maneuvers are a whole lot harder on the machine than they are by hand, and garter stitch is at the top of the list. So I began redesigning Nicky Epstein’s idea until there was nothing left but the idea. No more tedious garter stitch, just machine-knit squares of colors knitted in a continuous strip and joined modularly to adjoining strips. I could improvise a flower shape on the machine by casting on maybe a dozen stitches, knitting a couple of rows, binding off all but two of the stitches at the originating end, casting on stitches equal to the length of the first petal, and repeating the process until there were six petals, leaving an end long enough to join the thing in a ring and sew it to a square, one flower per color square. The fringes would be machine-knit i-cord, which is absolutely the sanity-preserving way to make i-cord. Machine knitting could replicate the appearance of the design’s elements without the time and tedium of hand knitting the garter stitch squares and sewing them together.

If I had stuck to the basic design elements I would have had it done with time to spare for my daughter’s 2022 birthday. But no, I had to get fancy. I decided to make it reversible, no wrong side, no side where the ends hide. First I decided to alternate the facing sides of the modularly-joined strips, knit side strip, then purl side strip. That meant that the appliqué needed to be decorative on both sides, with visible stitching on the “wrong” side that looked as if it was supposed to be looked at. I knitted a swatch square and experimented with my machine-knit flower shape, then embroidered the flower onto the square with great care to make the stitching look intentional. It took hours and it required skills that I didn’t really have, but I figured that I would get quicker and more skillful with practice. And I did, but it took about a year of practice to embroider a single flower onto a single square in less than three hours.

But back in the early, optimistic days of this blanket, I dragged my big bag of Wollmeise DK cakes upstairs to my standard gauge knitting machine. I knitted my first strip of eight strips, consisting of seven squares per strip. Then I knitted the seven flowers and the i-cord fringes and brought the piece downstairs to the couch to embroider the flowers onto the strip. It took about a week to embroider the flowers, awkwardly, unevenly, onto the squares. Then I went back upstairs to knit the next strip, and about halfway into the second strip, my knitting machine got really mad at me. Wollmeise DK is a heavy DK weight, almost a skinny worsted, and my standard gauge knitting machine isn’t built for that weight of yarn. It tried to be a good sport about it, but I overtasked its obliging nature and eventually it pushed back. It made scary grinding noises when I pushed the carriage against great resistance, I think from right to left. The other direction wasn’t as bad. My friend Tanya diagnosed the problem as static and sent me instructions for rigging up a plug to divert the static electricity by attaching one end of it to the metal parts of the machine and the other end into a wall socket. It helped a little, long enough to finish the second strip, but I wasn’t going to be able to finish the blanket on my machine.

So I moved my operations to Melissa’s store, Lovelyarns, where she has a Brother bulky KH270 machine upstairs. I didn’t really get the same gauge on the bulky as I was getting on the standard gauge machine, but I decided not to worry about it. I was still hoping to finish the blanket in time for the birthday at the end of November 2022, and it was October. Just to hedge my bets, I started hand knitting my daughter a sweater so she would have something for her birthday. Every day at the store, I knitted first a strip, then the flowers for that strip, which I attached loosely to the center of the assigned square through the ends of the flowers. My thinking about the ends had evolved during this phase. My original thought about the ends at the beginning and end of the color changes for the squares was to tie them up in some kind of decorative tassel, but on second thought, that seemed like something I wouldn’t be able to do well, so my third thought was to embroider the ends so that they were decorative on both sides. I started cutting very long ends at the corners where the colored squares started and ended, and at the beginnings and ends of the flower appliqués in order to embroider them later. When I finished the machine-knitting, I was about a month out from my daughter’s birthday. The blanket was not going to be that year’s birthday present. I really didn’t realize what a mess it was until someone on my Ravelry jokingly tweaked me by saying that the shriveled appliqué shapes and the long tangled ends looked like dead calamaris.

I have a thread on my Ravelry group for weekly goals, and pretty much every week DD2’s blanket was on my weekly to-do list, to sew on the flowers, and every week I kept the goal, even if it was just a few stitches on a single branch of a single flower, while other things took higher priority. It took about nine months of distracted activity to get the flowers attached and embroidered. During the summer my activity became more focused because I was determined that this would be the year I would give my daughter her blanket, so the blanket became a higher priority. Sewing on the flowers was pretty tricky. First I had to sew the ends of the appliqué together to form a circle, and then I tightened the inside of the circle to make it the size I wanted the center of the flower to be. The most difficult step was sewing the center of the flower to the center of its square so that it formed a credible circle on the wrong side because I had trouble orienting the direction of my stitches, since one side of the sewing was clockwise and the reverse side was counterclockwise. The other main challenge was my often failed attempt to space the arms of the flower shape at the same angle from the center circle, but I embraced the irregularity as a design feature of an organic life form.

I was using a blunt tapestry needle with a big eye that would allow me to thread the DK weight yarn easily, but my efforts at precision would have been facilitated if I had been using a needle with a sharper point. The blunt tip wanted only to go between stitches, which often wasn’t the best place for a straight line and even stitches while affixing the appliqué to the base fabric. It took a lot of practice to know how to get the needle between the plies of the yarn so that I could get the stitch where I wanted it to be. I’m sure that it’s possible to find tapestry needles with big eyes and sharp points, but it didn’t occur to me to look for them. I just used what I had. The result was the shaky, ghostly, six-armed shapes alternating with the solid, fleshier, six-armed shapes. It looked organic, and the consistent, repeating alternation made it look like an intentional design plan.

By mid-August, I had finished attaching the flowers, except for gaps where my ends hadn’t been long enough to cover the entire distance around the appliqué shape. I cut more lengths of yarn, much longer than I needed to attach the appliqué, so that afterward I could use the excess to doodle in embroidery, like this:

Bit by bit, that tangle of ends was being tamed. My embroidery technique developed as I worked my way through the squares. People who actually know how to embroider on knitting are well familiar with how to backstitch a solid, chained line by pushing the needle up between the plies of the previous stitch, but I discovered the split stitch, as it is called, for myself by accident. I enjoy the solid lines next to the dotted lines. It’s a pleasing effect, and makes the blanket perfectly reversible while not being perfectly the same on both sides, which was my goal.

Meanwhile, the evenings were getting colder, and I began training the blanket for its ultimate function: couch naps. Sleepiness would come over me as I embroidered, and I would spread the blanket over myself, and the blanket spread unconsciousness over me. The blanket had a lot of innate talent as a soporific, but I had to make sure it knew exactly what to do when it met my daughter and joined her household, so every evening, I embroidered it and napped underneath it to give it plenty of practice for its purpose in life. I was planning to visit my daughter at the end of October, so the day before the trip was my deadline for completing the embroidery. I met my deadline.

One final major task awaited me when I got back from that visit, machine-knitting the i-cord fringe. The last time I knitted the fringes, more than a year earlier, the machine didn’t have trouble knitting the three stitches for the fringe in a single direction, as one does for i-cord. Each square got about 15 fringes, 14 rows each, so I picked up three stitches from the edge, threaded the machine, and knitted back and forth 14 times. Then bound off and cut the yarn and moved on to the next fringe in the color square. Each color sequence of about 15 fringes took approximately 45 minutes, and I tried to do two sets of fringe every day. It took about a week, but toward the end of the process, the machine started to get balky, the way it had done when I was knitting the strips and had to move to Melissa’s bulky machine to finish the machine knitting. But I powered through on my standard gauge machine and was mightily relieved to finish that final fringe at home.

The fringe was knitted, finally, but it took another week to stuff the ends into the tops and bottoms of the i-cord tubes. Also there were little bits of ends that were peaking out from the freeform embroidery, so I tried to tamp them down by stabbing them with my felting tool. Some ends escaped me, but the ends eradication project was starting to feel like a mental illness, so I called it done and threw the blanket into a bath for blocking, with fervent hopes that washing it would make the fringe lie flat instead of folding over in the direction from which I picked up the stitches.

I didn’t have a space suitable for blocking the blanket properly and pinning the edges down to form a perfect rectangle with 90º angles at all the corners, so I hung it outside over the wall of my front porch. The side edges folded inward despite the no-curl edging I had knitted into the edge strips, but at least the fringes relaxed in the bath and hung down the way they were supposed to. After it was dry, I steamed the blanket and tried to get the edges to lie flat, which they never really did. Anyway, I’m really thrilled with how good the fringes look.

I don’t think that pictures showing the entire blanket do justice to the details, and it’s all details.

Here’s an example of the embroidery on both sides.

While my activity to finally finish this work was reaching its final stage, I was mindful of the calendar for another date: my older daughter’s birthday three weeks after my younger daughter’s. The younger daughter was coming to visit us for Thanksgiving a few days before her birthday, and I wanted her sister’s birthday present to be done in time for the younger one to model it for me, since I was going to have to wait for a long time for the older one to send me pictures, and I probably wasn’t going to be satisfied with them. I was motivated. I got it done. Then my daughter came home and she met her birthday present. They hit it off from the start. I was proud of how well I had trained it to do its job.

Eventually she submitted to a photo shoot to display her sister’s sweater. I wanted a photo of both works.

When I saw the modeled photos of my older daughter’s sweater, I wished I had started the heart several inches higher from the bottom than I did. I had a good reason for doing it the way I did, despite my later regrets. I wanted to finish the intarsia before I began the raglan shaping because I was short on time when I knitted that piece, and using the intarsia carriage while decreasing the sides of the piece would have added another layer of complication to the work at a time when I needed to get the piece off the machine to catch a flight home. But I have regrets. I hope my daughter likes it anyway. The colors are good, and I love the way the stripes of the sleeve play with the colors of the heart and the striping on the back.

DD2 modeling for DD1:

And just the sweater, photographed flat.

I also finished my fourth rendition of Dinner With My Captain, not completely, but enough to get my daughter to model her shirt, which I’ll give to her when I finally get around to blocking it properly and dispatching all of the ends. I’m currently working on my fifth Captain shirt, for my other daughter, but I’m taking my time with that one, because after five go-rounds, I’m starting to run out of steam.

P.S. When I’m making something that’s inspired by someone else’s idea, like the Nicky Epstein blanket, I make a point of not looking at the source material until I’m done so that I can forget what the original looked like and can take my version in a different direction. I changed every aspect of the original blanket in my project. When it was completely finished, I went back to look at Nicky’s blanket pattern. Despite everything, mine ended up looking a whole lot like hers! And it probably took me as long to make mine as it would have taken to have done it her way! But mine is reversible. And I didn’t have to hand-knit garter stitch, which I find deadly.