Hemlock Ring Blanket

For my 250th post, I have this to present to you:

Hemlock Ring Blanket

This baby turned out gorgeous and matches my kitchen floor nicely don't you think? On the last row before the edging, I ended up with 504 stitches on the 40 inch cable. If I had had any more stitches to put on it, I think the cables would have exploded.

It turned out to be approximately 52 inches in diameter and took 131 pins to pin it all out. I used quilter's T-pins to do this. The T-pins are far stronger than regular pins and very easy to work with.

You should have seen me blocking this on The Eldest's bed last night. I had my measuring tape, a bucket full of pins and one cat (to supervise my work of course) all on the bed. I stretched and tugged and pinned and tossed the cat. Then I stretched and tugged and re-pinned and re-tossed the cat off the bed all over again. It went on for quite a while. I have much stronger arm muscles now. Everyone should try cat tossing for super toned muscles.

I measured each section and made sure that the measurements were the same for each of them. The fan part, from the center hole to the fartherest tip measured 26 inches. The fan, from hole to bottom of the dip measured 20 inches. It took a lot of fiddling to get this all uniform, but it worked beautifully.

To recap this project:

Pattern: Jared Flood's (aka Brooklyn Tweed) Hemlock Ring Blanket
Yarn: Cascade Ecological Wool
Color: 8087
Needles: size 10
Time begun: May 3, 2008
Finished: May 14, 2008

The project goes really fast until you get around row 67 or so. After that it took a minimum of 15 minutes to do each row and a max of about 25 minutes. The edging took the longest time to do.

Took me a whole 11 days to complete. Now imagine how much less time this would have taken me if I didn't have a two year old menace running around the house and demanding my attention 24/7!