Bye bye, baby (blanket)!

I seem to have had an unintended Rip-Along project. The baby blanket. I was working on it the other night and had made a pattern mistake, and in taking the row out twice I maybe dropped a stitch or two, so I took out a few more rows and it wasn't really getting any better. So I decided to just take it all out. It hadn't really taken that long to kit, so I didn't mind. And since I hadn't been happy with the pattern, I had a chance to change it. So out it went and I started over. I went back down to 8s (from 10s), widened the border between the increasing yo border, charted out bigger diamonds, and chose a different double decrease. So now I'm flying along on the new version, and I'm much happier with it. The pattern is apparent, the blanket won't be quite as loose for baby fingers, and everything is good. I'm probably about halfway back to where I was on Thursday (ready to add the white!), so it won't take long to gain back that ground. Yay!

The next baby blanket challenge will be what pattern to do in the white sections. I'm thinking of trying to do some sort of swirl or scroll of eyelets in those sections, hopefully to keep the whole blanket from being blocky. I have some ideas, and when I get to that point I'll know how many stitches I'll end up with, so I'll be able to chart it out and organize something that will work. I'm looking forward to doing this and tweaking the design. The idea I like best is kind of a pinwheel of curls (straight lines come out from the center and curl at the ends), but I figured out that it needs an odd number of pieces to look right, and I'm not sure how well I'll be able to chart that, but I'll mess around and see what I can figure out.

It's Saturday, and finally I don't have anywhere to be. I made french toast for breakfast, I have a pot of tea, a book, a ton of knitting projects, and almost two seasons of Alias on DVD. Maybe I'll marinate some chicken for dinner, and curl up in my cozy house. Of course, the deep freeze has passed, but now I can stay inside to make up for all of the cold trips to and from work this week!

(And maybe if I'm really ambitious, I'll weave some ends and put the facings on my Berocco jacket, so that maybe tomorrow I can take a FO to Knitsmiths!)