Today's post is about how I made a grief blanket.
The overall design is modular. I printed and cut out 1-inch squares with the design on them, then moved them around on a table. It was much like designing a quilt block, but using texture rather than color and value. The most common block has a two triangle pattern, with half the block in moss stitch and half the block in welts.
The "joining" block is a double-moss stitch, essentially a 2×2 checkerboard. I could have played with other block patterns. Indeed, I generated multiple options.
I ended up with three innovations on this project: a refinement of a Mondragon
loop block join, a continuous chain selvedge, and an improved way to add a
perpendicular border to a chain-stitch edging.
The blocks are knit both vertically and horizontally. While normally I would have picked up blocks as for a modular project, the joins in this project are Mondragon loops. Because the welts are narrow stripes, picking up created a noticeable one more row. (In the above image, compare the swatch on the left with the one on the right. On the left, you can tell the top horizontal welt is too thick.) In a bulky yarn, you could tell one stripe was thicker than the others. The solution is complicated, because I often needed to work rows in the opposite direction from how the blanket was growing. In multiple places I turned the last row of stitches into long loops and worked two rows of the perpendicular adjacent block out and back on a Mondragon loop. I did a lot of splicing yarn, since this yarn will wet-splice. The center blanket is now all one long piece.
I planned for a plain chain-stitch selvedge by using crochet-chain cast-on, a
slipped-stitch selvedge, and a normal bind-off. Normally, the chain stitch
runs in one direction for part of the project and a different direction for
the other part of the project. After reading TECHknitter's post about
controlled drop, I realized it wouldn't violate the laws of physics to un-chain and re-chain
the edge so it is continuous in the same direction, then graft.
Even with a nice chain edge, the blanket looked a little unfinished. The chain edge works well, but for a project at this scale, a more substantial border was appropriate. I decided to add a garter stitch border. My careful choice of knit and purl patterns means this blanket is reversible. I wanted the border to be reversible as well. This is where I returned to Gayle Roehm's clever solution. Picking up in the edge and then working off Mondragon loops is not a beginner skill even in garter stitch, but it was worth the effort. With some short-row corner turns and grafting the end to the beginning, I have a nice border that goes all the way around.
In the end, one of the things I love about this blanket is how it looks simple
but is not. It is like a secret. A knowledgeable knitter sitting down to
reverse-engineer this project would suddenly realize there is more to it than
initially expected. The stitch pattern makes the eye wander, seeing stars one
minute then pinwheels the next. And the overall path of the yarn in this is
labyrinthine. Grief — or any strong emotion — can feel like a labyrinth,
disorienting and possibly without end. If you steadfastly walk the path, you
are guided through. What you leave behind might have its own strange
beauty.
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