My Sky Blanket... Finally Finished!

Remember my sky blanket? After finishing it last month I have finally taken some nice photos of it to share with you guys. Hurrah!

(Big thanks to my parents for holding it up for that photo!)

 

The blanket was inspired by / based on Lea Redmond's awesome Sky Scarf project where you knit a row of a scarf each day for a year, based on the weather that day.

 

I loved this idea but decided to knit a blanket instead so I'd end up with a cosy blanket I could use year after year instead of a scarf that would be fun to knit but which (being honest with myself) I knew I'd never wear. I also thought knitting blanket squares would make for a more portable project than having to carry a half-finished scarf around with me for months.

I started on 1st January 2012, and knitted a square for 360 days.

 

The plan was to sew the blanket together gradually (each week or so) as I knitted more squares but I fell a little behind at the end of the year when I was busy with a) the Christmas season in my shops and b) working on my new book. Then this year I just got a bit of project fatigue and couldn't face sewing in all those yarn ends! (So very many ends)  .

I got there eventually though and I cannot even begin to tell you how thrilled I am with how this project has turned out. I think the finished blanket looks gorgeous and I am still totally in love with the concept - a blanket that's a record of (almost) a year of the weather! It makes me happy every time I look at it.

Here are some snaps of the blanket as it grew...

February:

  
April:

June:

August:

Early November:

And here it is, finished! Woohoo!

I arranged the squares running from left to right in rows, like a calendar. In the above photo, the top left square is day #1 and the bottom right square is day #360.

I love the mix of these colours together! Because each square is knitted with two strands of double-knit yarn, the finished blanket is thick and very cosy. 

The back looks like this:

 

Oh, and there's a pretty blue and white button sewn onto one corner so I'll always be able to tell where the year of squares begins. 

 

You can find instructions for knitting a sky scarf here but if you want to knit a blanket just like mine, I'll be sharing all the info about how I made my blanket in a "how to" post in a week or two :)

Update: find out how to knit your own sky blanket HERE.