The Evolution of a Rainbow Blanket

Blogging about my mini patchwork squares blanket last month made me realise that I never got round to properly photographing my rainbow blanket when I finished it a couple of years ago. I blogged about it being almost finished, and said I'd take photos of it finished "sometime soon" but, alas, never found the time and here we are two years later already.
 
I love my rainbow blanket, and really enjoyed making it so (as with the mini squares blanket last month) so I'm taking a look back at how it's developed over the years before having a "yay! finished blankets!" photo session.

 

In my teens I knitted a couple of blankets as gifts for my family, and also knitted a whole bunch of squares that never got used for anything. I rediscovered them in my 20s and began very slowly knitting more squares so I could finally turn them into a finished blanket. Or, rather, two blankets, because teen me (by accident? or by design??) had been knitting two different sizes of squares!

I finished the first blanket in 2013 (click to see pictures!), and in 2014 was busy knitting squares in assorted bright colours to add to the second blanket. All the squares were knitted in plain garter stitch, using double knit acrylic yarn and UK size 8 (4mm) knitting needle, casting on 30 stitches to make squares measuring approximately 14cm. 

At this point I had a whole bunch of dark grey squares in the mix (knitted with yarn left over from my sky blanket) and was thinking about putting the squares together in a block design similar to the one I was using for my mini squares blanket.
 

I wasn't totally happy with this layout, though, so I just focused on knitting squares from the yarn I already had and added in a few more colours I thought would blend in well.

In October that year I took out the darker squares and arranged the others in colour order and they just POPPED so the grey definitely had to go (I unravelled them and re-knitted them as mini squares for my patchwork blanket). 

By July 2015 I had 70 squares knitted, but the colour mix was looking a bit imbalanced.

I thought about just adding in some greens to balance out the "hot" reds and pinks, but decided to go for the full spectrum and cram in as many bright, happy colours as possible. So I bought a few more balls of yarn in zingy shades and continued slowly knitting more squares.
    

Frustratingly, when playing around with possible layouts for the blanket, I realised that a whole bunch of the squares were too big! (I guess I must have muddled up my knitting needles at some point?) I unravelled them all and started re-knitting them the correct size in the summer of 2015.

I spent the autumn of that year knitting a lot of blanket squares...

 

  ... and by November my stash of squares looked like this:

In December 2015 I finally sat down and planned the final layout. I'd been building up my rainbow spectrum stash without any real plan and was very pleasantly surprised by how easy it was to fit all the squares together; I just needed some more green!

 

I started stitching the outer sections of the blanket together...

... bought a final ball of bright green yarn, and began knitting green squares.
 

I finished knitting the very final square while watching Eurovision in May 2016 (I love Eurovision), then immediately started adding the remaining squares to the blanket.

I couldn't stop smiling while weaving the in the last few yarn ends; those colours just burst with happiness!

I wove in and trimmed the last of the yarn ends on May 25th 2016.

I've used the blanket a lot since then (I'm actually sitting on it right now as I type this) and it brings me joy on a daily basis. I hope I'll have a chance to take lots of snaps to capture that rainbow joy and properly show it off in another blog post sometime soon!

In the meantime... for more blanket-y goodness, follow the links to read about the making of my patchwork mini squares blanket, or my sky blanket.