Baby blanket

Back in January I went to a yarn exchange. It was amazingly well organized. Everyone piled their yarn by type in a kitchen nook of the apartment. Then we all drew letters and went in alphabetical order. Each time you went, you could take two units of yarn. A unit could be anything from a single ball or skein of yarn to a whole set. If there were multiples of a yarn, you had to take all of it but it counted as a single unit. That is how I ended up with 10-12 skeins of this:

This was one of the last units that I picked. It's fuzzy and acrylic. I had sat debating about it for a long time. To be honest, it was the fact that it was made in France that caused me to cave. Not really logical but I figured I could convince Husband that it was a good find for no other reason than that. He was, of course, not too amused with my haul from the exchange and didn't like the logic that I brought home fewer units that I had left with.

So this yarn has been sitting, waiting for me to come up with a brilliant plan with it. One of the people at the exchange suggested making it into a monster, but I have no idea what to do with a monster once I make one. I thought about making a monster blanket or hats to donate but nothing really inspired me. Then I went to Wisconsin. I was out there for a work conference and I have family in the area. Family that I haven't seen in years. 

Taking advantage of the fact that the conference was winding down on Saturday and that we had a long wait until our bus ride home, Husband and I met up with my aunt and grandma. While we were spending time together, I learned that one of my cousins and his wife had just had a baby girl. This led to inspiration! I could knit a baby  blanket! Even better, I could design the blanket!

To be honest, I also needed a project while waiting for the yarn of my next Cookie A sock club shipment. I cast on the yarn to keep myself amused and started knitting. I hadn't actually committed to the baby blanket yet. At that point it might have become a scarf. Yet as the yarn knitted up, it seemed like a perfect baby blanket. So I sat down later and sketched out what I wanted it to look like. 

Years ago, I was dating a guy who loved the 4th Doctor so I made him a very long scarf. Instead of just knitting it, I started to do stitch patterns including cabling. I hadn't done it since then but I love cables. So that was the main idea to go into the blanket. I then figured out how many stitches I would need and how many I had leftover. Then it was a matter of looking for a stitch pattern that would fit into the spaces between. At first, I was going to do a seed stitch next to the cable but it didn't read well with the fuzzy yarn, so I frogged it when I ended up messing something up along the way. I also decided to do a basketweave between the cables to add texture to the blanket. When I was about 8, my grandma made me a blanket, which I still have. I love all the textures and how complex it is and I wanted to go something similar to it. I'm not at the level that I feel confident doing something that complex and I wish that Grandma was still alive so I could ask her about it. Now all I can do is look at it and try to puzzle out the stitches on my own.

To figure out what stitches to use, I turned to the internet. I used Knitting on the Net for the basketweave stitch. This was the same site I used years ago when working on the long scarf. I also ended up using the Lion Brand Stitch finder for the cable. My hope is that once I finish, I'll write the pattern up and share it on Ravelry. I have a feeling it's going to take a while. Below is my current progress. I've not been working on it a lot lately between work and wanting to make socks for my husband. I also need to move it to a larger project bag as it's starting to get bulky in the one I've been using.

One of the cables

Basketweave stitch