More Pattern Ideas

If any of you own any of the Walker Treasury books, this website is a really great resource:

http://thewalkertreasury.wordpress.com/

It has really good color photos of a lot of the patterns in these books, which are a lot better than the black and white pictures in the books. If you're skilled at "reading" knitting you might get some neat pattern ideas just from looking at the pictures too even if you don't have the books. I don't own any personally but I check them out from the library sometimes, they are great for inspiration.

First Block

I'm a little slow these days, but I just finished my first block. It's in Stone Cotton-Ease, and is a diamond knit/purl pattern from "the New Knitting Stitch Library".
These photos are awful but the sun has disappeared and I have no idea when it will be back!
The pattern is a 19-stitch repeat so I cast on 40 stitches total; 38 for two repeats of the pattern and one stitch on each edge, plus a row at the beginning and end for a border.

It was a really annoying pattern to remember/read, so I had to keep referring back to my chart, but overall it was not too bad.

3 blocks done!

Although I can't claim to have finished them myself. After I did the first one, I passed the yarn & needles onto a friend (and MDC mama) to do a few. I simply had to work through some of my backlog before I did any more.

She finished 2 blocks in less than a week, and that finished off the skein (with a few yards left, at the most). I'm going to try to make it to Joann's to grab another skein -- of a color other than Spice. ;)

Speaking of JoAnn's, they have the big 4 oz. balls of Sugar & Cream on sale for 1.79 (I think it is) this week. :)

Just updating you all

I have stone cotton ease that I have started. I am a little over halfway done with 1 square. I am doing a waffle stitch pattern. I will post a pic when I can. I also got walnut chunky wool-ease.

Blanket size

What do ya'll think of doing a 40 square blanket -- 5 x 8. According to my math that would be about 3 3/4 feet by 6 feet tall. That's decent for a "throw" right? Or even a twin bed. Hmmm...maybe we should do 6x8?

Deadline & other details...

Someone asked about a deadline; I'm inclined to leave it open for now, but it would be great if you could set and post a goal amount of blocks per month. I know some of us could do one a day, while others are lucky to finish one in a week -- and that doesn't take into account other knitting projects.

Personally, I'm going for between 4 & 12 per month -- that will also depend on how many I can get out of a skein of yarn. I'll do some measuring and decide on how many blocks we need per blanket (opinions always welcome).

Regarding seaming... I'm open to volunteers -- someone commented they might be able to get their local knitting group to help with one. I might be able to do the same, there is an mdc mama in the next town who runs a fairly regular knitting group, so I could ask her.

Feel free to pass this blog address on to other knitting friends -- we aren't exclusive to MDC here, necessarily. :)

bought willow color chunky

Michaels had no chunky at all (no wonder I accidently bought the thick and quick) but hobby lobby had willow (green) spice and black only. Since there are already a number of people doing the spice I bought the willow. I couldn't remember what colors were selected to use, but it matches the spice so I hope it'll work. For my first block I'm gonna use the quinn bag cable pattern- I've never done cables before and really want to do that bag so I figured this would be a fun way to test it out!