merry fo-ing christmas

Merry Christmas all! I'm still pretty much snowed in in Portland. My parents and I have made it out to the grocery store a couple times, but it's been a complete ordeal! Fortunately I've had plenty of knitting to keep me busy. Specifically, this:





which I think may be be biggest thing I've ever knit, which is funny considering I've been knitting for quite a while now. Almost ten years? I guess I have a short attention span. :)


The full story here is that this lap blanket is a Christmas present for my dad. My grandmother (his mom) died about a year and a half ago. She was a tremendous mother, grandmother, and great-grandmother and took care of our sizable family in New Hampshire with humor and grace. Like most women of her generation, she also crafted a great deal and left behind basically an entire floor of a house full of supplies for every craft you could ever imagine. Fortunately my mother and I are the only knitters in the family now and we got full run of knitting and crocheting materials. In the end we each came away with a couple big boxes full of yarn and quite a few needles. There were also knitting machines - two or three of them, I think, and yarn that came with them. That's where this blue yarn came from. One of the machines was from Germany, and there was a good deal of old Schachenmayr nomotta yarn of various weights and fiber contents. This blue yarn was the least dated and most masculine color available, so I thought it would be fitting to make something for my dad with his mom's old yarn.





The pattern is the hemlock ring blanket, rediscovered and circulated by Jared Flood. I found a useful pdf of the pattern here on the Rainey Sisters blog that I worked with.





Like I said, the yarn is old and German. It's by Schachenmayr nomotta, which is obviously still around, and it's called beatrice. (Here's the page I made for it on ravelry.) Since I had to enter it in ravelry myself I'm guessing it's not something you see around a lot. I see another person has stashed it since then, and the label looks completely different (but the yarn is the same bright blue - ha ha). It says, in German "100% pure new wool," but even with that description I had my doubts for a while. I suspect it's heavily treated to be washable. It doesn't feel wooly, and even when I dumped it in the sink at the end I wasn't entirely sure I hadn't just knit a blanket out of 100% acrylic. When I started laying it out to block it became apparent that it was not, in fact, acrylic, and I breathed a huge sigh of relief.


About the pattern - it's a shockingly quick and fun knit for being a big piece of lace. I had one false start when I screwed up the feather and fan pattern in the beginning, but since it was pretty early on I didn't have too much to re-do and I was well on my way once again. The only thing I'll definitely change if I knit it again is the cast-off. I worked the knit cast-off described in the pdf I linked to above, and holy God is it ever a pain in the ass. They mention a crochet alternative, which I'll probably use next time. The results of the knit cast-off really do look like crochet, so I suspect this will be basically the same thing but with no turning a big unwieldy blanket around over and over again (which is totally scrunched up on the needles by the end - not fun).


Here are the deets on rav in case anyone is looking for more info, and merry Christmas once again! I hope everyone is having a happy, safe, loving holiday.