Knit Knacks: Keith's Blanket

When I came across the double knitting technique on YouTube, I could not go ahead and try something simple first. Of course not-- that's not how I do things. Instead, I decided I was going to make my husband a blanket for his birthday. At that point I had a month and a half to make it in, which I figured was plenty of time.

I knew that I wanted to do a bunch of Celtic motifs, as my husband loves everything Irish (hey, he married me!). I spent a LOT of time online, looking for existing patterns, and also looking at various clipart. I then re-charted every little detail and set to work.

The blanket is not perfect. In fact, if you looking at the Celtic knot work in the center, you can see where a line went wrong, and I was too far ahead, when I discovered it, to rip everything out and fix it.

This blanket took nearly four pounds of yarn, and is not overly big. It is perfectly reversible, as each motif was created, stitch-by-stitch, both front and back at the same time.

My husband actually picked out the colors and watched the whole thing unfold. (There was certainly no way that I could work on this and keep it secret from him.) I had my cheering section, with all my boys, who would applaud my progress, and help me stay motivated.

I had a little superstitious moment with this blanket, though. I would only work on it when I was in a positive mind-frame, while thinking about positive things. I wanted every stitch to be saturated with love and affection and positive energy.  Perhaps that sounds silly, but I stuck to that rule.

I used five different patterns to create my charts. It was interesting to read the charts, because I had to keep track of which direction I was going for each side. One side I would read the pattern -----> this way and then, on the next row, it had to be <------ this way. Otherwise things wouldn't match up.

 I knew, when I started, that this was going to take a long time to make, and it really got down to the wire. I finished it about a week before my husband's birthday. When I finished the blanket, I crocheted in double crochet with both yarns around the border, followed by three border rows of single crochet in white, and then a last border row of double crochet in the blue.

The gift and effort were well appreciated. My husband wanted to put it up on the wall as a decoration piece, but I told him that I wanted it to be used. I didn't go through all of that to have it NOT be used. So, it is used frequently and, as it is nice and thick and padded, it also doubles as the spot where we set down the baby when I need a little break.

I would never recommend jumping in with this as the first project done with double knitting. I had a steep learning curve, and I had many moments, when I had to revamp my charts, or go back and take out rows of work to fix a problem. (Removing rows in Double Knit is complicated, especially when you are in the middle of a color switch!)