Stitch Treasury Blanket

I’ve written before about how I started to incorporate the suggestions from Joyful into my home; rearranging furniture so I can always see the sky, making sure I have some kind of greenery in my eye-line no matter where I’m sitting, creating visual harmony by ordering my bookshelves by colour, and so on. I’d also been introducing more yellow into my home as an instant mood-lifter, but only small elements in patterns on duvet sets and e.g. my bee embroidery. I wanted more, and what better way to do that than with a huge, cosy, bright yellow blanket.

It so happens that in my pattern stash I have a brown envelope containing the Stitch Treasury blanket; a dozen or so pages snipped from consecutive issues of some magazine from the early ’90s, Good Housekeeping or Woman’s Weekly, one of those. My mother had clearly faithfully bought this magazine for all those weeks in a row, collected the patterns, carefully stored them for years… only for her terrible daughter to pinch them, probably without even asking. There are 26 different stitch patterns (hence the ‘Stitch Treasury’ designator) covering everything from cables to lace, small patterns to large, and inevitably a few bobbles. There’s even bonus instructions for a jumper you can make with a few of the squares.

With the idea in place, it was finally time to make good on my shameless purloin. I picked a delightful shade of mustard/goldenrod/egg yolk yellow yarn in cheap and cheerful acrylic (Paintbox Simply Aran in Mustard Yellow, for curious). The original pattern was for cotton, but I know from experience that cotton is really hard on the hands and wrists, and when knitting something the size of a blanket, you really do have to think about the ergonomics. I already have some mild RSI issues thanks to my various gaming addictions and that can flare up if I’m not mindful of my knitting technique. And I do prefer natural fibres, but knowing what a messy eater I am (and how much time I spend cocooned on my sofa, surrounded by games and snacks), washability is critical.

The best thing about working on a blanket made in small pieces like this is that it was extremely portable. If I was going away for a few days I could stuff a couple of balls of yarn and my needles into a bag and I was good to go. Bits of this blanket have been to Devon, London, Brighton, all over the place before coming home; which was Cardiff, at the time. And once I’d gotten home, I could sew the pieces together immediately. I did this partly as a clever plan to avoid the pain of having to do it all at the end, and partly so I could sit under it as I was knitting the rest of it. I did learn something from the tedious garter blanket, at least.

And here it is, in its glorious sunny… glory. It’s great on a gloomy day, bringing warmth into my chilly little room, but absolutely brilliant on a sunny day. The sun comes out, shines in through my window, and the light bounces off it and makes my entire flat glow with a happy brightness. I can’t help but smile to look at it, which was entirely the point. 10 out of 10, self.