The Two-year Log Cabin Blanket Project

When I started knitting, one of Jason's friends told him he'd probably wind up with an afghan someday. I took it as a challenge. I'm bookending this post with the finished item, because I don't know how to control which picture will be featured when I link it in a facebook post.

I asked Jason what sort of afghan he might like, and he said it should have bright colors and geometric shapes. Well all right, then! I had been wanting to use the Very Pink Knits tutorial and pattern for a log cabin blanket. http://verypink.com/2012/02/15/log-cabin-scrap-blanket/

Staci Perry walks you through the construction of this easy project. The only reason it took two years was because I would get the blocks to a certain point, tire of it, and work on something else for a while.

I wanted to match an Ikea rug that Jason has in his living room. In the photo below, you can see there are seven colors: Bright red, sort of an antique red, orange, gold, green, dark and light gray.

Because the rug has seven colors and I wanted nine for each block, I added two more green shades. Jason has a teal and an orange parsons table in the room, so I wanted to include the teal. I bought Caron Simply Soft, an acrylic yarn that is pretty soft and comes in a wide variety of colors.

The colors are pretty well represented in the picture below. This was taken after completing the first step in each block, making a garter stitch square of 20 stitches by 40 rows. The very last stitch is not bound off, but has a safety pin stuck through it. Each time you begin a new color, you create a strip by picking up and knitting along the next side of whatever part of the block has been completed. So the first strip goes like this: stick the needle through the remaining stitch of the old color. Rotate the piece clockwise a quarter turn. Pick up and knit 20 stitches along the side, one stitch for every two rows. Knit the 20 stitches back, and on the last one, knit it together with the extra leftover stitch from the prior color. Continue knitting the 20 stitches of the new color for 20 rows and bind off all but the last stitch.

Here I have added the first strip as described above. I have also done the second strip, which requires 30 stitches: 10 picked up in the 20 rows of strip one, plus 20 picked up along the cast on edge of the initial square.

The picture below is of a completed block. It was built like this: Green square, light gray strip one, teal strip two, orange strip three, blue-green strip four, dark gray strip five, bright red strip six, gold strip seven, and antique red strip eight. (The rotation described would be counter-clockwise, but the block is upside-down.) It is pinned down to be steamed into a nice even square before adding borders and assembling.

Strip eight has 60 stitches in it. Each strip is 20 rows wide, and when you are picking up along the rows, you pick up one stitch for each two rows. So the 60 stitches in strip eight are picked up in this order: 10 along the rows of gold strip seven, 40 along the bound-off edge of blue-green strip four, 10 along the rows of dark gray strip five.

Notice on the back side how each color change causes a dashed line inside the prior color. Each block and strip creates two yarn ends that require hiding and securing. At the color changes, they are knotted together, and then the ends are buried. At first I was just going over and over the seam, but later I watched another Staci Perry video and learned how to weave them into the purl bumps on the back side in a barely-noticeable way.

I laid all the completed blocks out to form a blanket three blocks wide by four blocks long. When I picked the colors for each block, I just assigned them by "promoting" them in the same order, rotating through nine of the blocks. For the last three, I just winged it, making sure none of the blocks had the same arrangement as the first one I made with the same center color. The repeated center colors are bright red, gold, and orange.

So, if I assembled them in the order I made them, there would be a clear pattern in the first nine blocks that would show the rotation. I mixed them up with no square repeated in a row or column, and no color adjoining itself in a neighboring block. There are a few places where I have some colors too close, either butting up or catty-corner, but overall, it's OK. Anything that is too close ended up separated by the black border. 

Knowing the arrangement before adding the borders is important. The edge of a block that is on the outside will have a 20-row black border. Inside edges have 10-row black borders. Border pieces are strips made exactly like all of the others, except after adding the first border strip, you no longer have to deal with color changes.

The completed, bordered blocks are assembled by sewing them together using mattress stitch. There are ways to crochet blocks together, but that would require being sure to have all of the crochet stitches pointing in consistent directions and putting them in the knitting stitch-for-stitch. I didn't want to mess with that. My sewn seams aren't as nice as I would like, but the black yarn makes them less noticeable. Jason likes it.