Patchwork Plans - Knitted Blankets In Progress

My patchwork blanket has grown a lot this year!

This is a slow, ongoing project using yarn left over from other knitting projects. I knit mini moss stitch squares from the leftover yarn, then sew the squares into blocks... then add the blocks to the blanket. It's been really fun seeing the blanket take shape almost organically over the many weeks and months I've been working on it.

Earlier this week, while watching lots of made-for-TV Christmas movies, I added a whole stack of squares to the blanket. I'm weaving in the yarn ends as I go along - here are just some of the ends from this week!

I love the controlled randomness of the pattern and the jumble of colours.

 

I've not been following a plan, just going with the flow and seeing how the blanket developed over time. I started with a few different sections (so I could spread the colours evenly across the blanket without having to wait until I had hundreds of squares to work with) which I've been gradually joining together... and this week I finally joined them all up to make one big piece.

I laid all the pieces out on the floor, worked out the final size of the blanket (30 x 30 squares), decided how the already-knitted pieces would best fit together within that, then added more squares to join the sections together.

I thought it would be fun to draw a chart to record all the squares I've knitted so far, so I could easily count them and clearly see the pattern that was emerging. It took a while to colour in all those squares, but it was totally worth it.

It was great seeing how the squares will look within the final shape of the blanket, and it's actually given me an idea for how to finish the blanket!

Instead of spending the coming years slowly knitting another 400+ squares from more yarn left overs and eventually (likely many, many years down the road) ending up with a colourful but fairly ordinary patchwork blanket... I've decided to stick with this central sweep of colour and to keep the rest of the blanket plain white.

I'll work from the outside in, filling up the space with white squares. In the meantime, I'll use any new bits of left over yarn to knit more squares for the central colour explosion. It's still going to take me a long time to finish this blanket but this way I'll actually end up with a finished blanket before my 40s!

In other blanket-y news, I finally planned the layout for my rainbow blanket! Yay!

I'd just been building up a stash of squares along the rainbow spectrum, without any real plan as to how to arrange them, so I was pleasantly surprised by how easy it was to put together an arrangement I liked (I just need to buy some more green yarn and knit squares for that missing row). 

Even from that blurry, dark photo you can see what a riot of happy rainbow  colour this blanket is going to be! It's the perfect project to be working on in these dark winter days.