My Favorite Blanket

Short update on the socks before we go into my weird showcase for the day.  I turned the heels!  I'm still somewhat suspicious of this whole Fleegle heel thing, since I ended up only doing 20 rounds of gusset increases rather than 30 and that meant increasing to 32 stitches rather than decreasing after the actual turn.  But they fit okay as far as I can tell, and I am somewhat more cheerful now that it looks like I may actually reach the end of the ball at some point.

The front of the sock is three cable panels, and the back of the leg adds in the outer two cables while leaving the center in stockinette, which I think is pretty neat.  Because I'd like them to be aligned with the cables on the front of the foot I actually started them on round 3 rather than round 1, but I'm probably going to just ignore those first two rounds and pretend I have them.  My plan is to shoot for two full repeats of these cables, so 24 rounds (minus the two at the beginning, but that's fine) so I have more knitting to do before I start getting impatient.  If I feel like I'll probably run out of yarn before that, I can switch to the ribbing.  Otherwise, that's the goal.  Twenty-four rows (I've already completed six, so eighteen to go), and then I can either add another few rows or go straight to the ribbing.

So I did not adequately prepare for Showcase today either.  I am a bad blogger, obviously.  I shall try to have something for you next week, but for today I'm going to quietly show off my favorite blanket ever.

Yeah.  As much as I love my Octuple Rainbow, and as proud as I am of my Friendship Star Quilt Afghan, this quilt is my favorite blanket ever.

It's actually not mine, though!  This gorgeous piece of work is Ian's, a gift last Thanksgiving from his grandmother (and assorted other female relatives).  It's hand-quilted with an intricate floral pattern that looks so perfect I am in awe that an actual person did that with her hands.

I'm a sucker for chevrons, and a sucker for colorplay, and this baby has both.  I love the scrappy, mismatched lines that make it look fractured.  In fact, I fell in love from the first moment I saw it (a fuzzy, awkwardly-angled webcam picture).  This is by no means the first quilt of Ian's I had any contact with -- I've been cuddling up with his quilts for a long time, but I was never emotionally attached to any of them until this one.

I've borrowed this quilt once before, for about a week last March.  It was a trade for the Octuple when Ian and I were both having bad weeks and wanted a piece of each other to snuggle at night.  I brought it home from Astronomy class and put it on my bed without anyone noticing.  When my mother came in the next morning she asked, "Where'd you get a quilt?"  and when my dad woke me up for church a few days later he asked exactly the same question.  It made me laugh.  I hated giving it back, although I was happy to have my Octuple again.

Ian usually sleeps with the quilt and a comforter, but since I gave him the Friendship Star he hasn't really needed this (he says the Friendship Star is always warm when the rest of his blankets are cold, and he finds that somewhat scary while still adoring it).  So he was going to let me borrow it for a while.  I asked when he wants it back, assuming that it would be sometime next month.  "Oh, I don't need it for the rest of the semester."

I get to sleep with this until May.  May!  I am so happy.  And I forgot it was there while I was at school so when I walked into my room after class I caught sight of it, stopped dead in the doorway, and started happy-humming.  It's such a treasure, and I'm so happy to have it in my possession for a while.