Oh no - no FO today

My run of FOs has come to an end, and instead I have lots of WIPs - some old and some new.

The Hitchhiker continues apace and I hope to be finished with that fairly soon.

I have also started a sock yarn blanket - yes I know I said I would never do one but it just goes to show that you should never say never. During a spring-clean of my sock yarn stash I unearthed over 1.2kg of sock yarn (and that is just the good stuff). I found a lot of Regia and basic sock yarn leftovers which went to the charity shop.

So, what is one to do with 1.2kg of beautiful (mostly hand-dyed) sock yarn but turn it into a thing of beauty - a monster sock yarn blanket no less.

I am following this pattern, but with modifications so that the first square is turned on it's side - see here-  to become a diamond. This means that the blanket is then shaped with straight edges and avoids the need to knit lots of little triangles to fill in the gaps.

I had a very productive day recently and made a flying start;

That pesky thing called work has slowed me down a little since, but I am aiming to do a square a day, with the odd power blitz on it every so often.

I won't bore you with it's slow incremental progress but I think it will be fun to do a monthly update of progress - if nothing else it will keep the project in the front of my knitting mind and stop it sinking to the murky depths of my WIP pile.

I read a helpful tip for knitting one of these blankets somewhere which said that you should aim to get a sizeable amount done in the first few weeks when enthusiasm levels are at their highest. Once that's done, it's a lot harder to ignore a blanket with 50+ squares compared to one with just 5.

I'll get back to you on that one :)

WIPing the sock yarn stash

This year sees me facing up to my considerable stash of sock yarn. As beautiful as it is, it needs to earn its keep in my house and become something else.
I don't have enough to undertake a mammoth blanket such as this wonderful example (or the mental fortitude either) but I do want to be able to make something useful. 

DH commented the other day on these stripey scarves you often see men wearing - long and thin with horizontal stripes. That put me in mind of the Mini Mania scarf - something which has been in my queue after seeing some lovely  examples on Ravelry.

Now, long rows of linen stitch don't sound like fun to me but over 1100 Ravelers can't be wrong. I've picked out a mixture of blues/greys/greens from my stash as well as the odd pop of colour, but I've left out the bright pink. DH's colour choices tend towards the conservative so I don't want to scare him.

Who knows - if I try to do a row per day I might have it ready for him by Christmas.