Misnomer

When my brother and sister-in-law announced they were expecting last year I decided to make them the Owl Obsession blanket, by Marken, but because they didn't plan to find out the sex of the baby, and didn't have any set nursery colour-scheme or anything, I planned to go for a fairly neutral theme. 

However, I drew a blank finding the sort of thing I had in mind in the local knitting shops. The original pattern uses a self-striping yarn for the owls, but I couldn't find anything suitable in the sort of colours I had in mind (soft browns and greys). Eventually I opted to go with Debbie Bliss Cashmerino Aran in a fairly neutral palette of brown, yellow, blue, and cream. I bought what I imagined would be enough yarn, and set to work, putting my new project up on Ravelry and, originally enough, calling it It's a Hoot.

I was wrong on all counts. There wasn't nearly enough yarn and it certainly wasn't a hoot. Chapter of Disasters would have been nearer the mark.

It became apparent as soon as I swatched that I was going to have to use a smaller needle than stated. The 5.5mm in the pattern produced an unacceptably holey fabric, but with a 5mm my gauge was way off so the motifs came out a lot smaller than expected. Other than starting again with a thicker yarn I had no choice but to introduce more motifs to get a decent size blanket, and that was going to mean I needed more yarn. 

Having made the fatal mistake of buying it on a special day out I couldn’t easily get back to the shop I bought the original yarn from in order to match dyelots,  so I ended up introducing more colours instead. My mother-in-law kindly allowed me to raid her stash for anything suitable, but though the navy blue she gave me harmonised well with the other colours, the result was less "subtle" than "drab". A deep brown (Dream in Colour rather than Debbie Bliss) worked a lot better, but then I started looking at reviews of the yarn on Ravelry and noticed how much everyone said it ran when washed. And since the main colour I was using was cream, I quickly chickened out, frogged a lot of it and went back to the drawing-board. 

Next I introduced the "silver" pale blue colour, which was nice, but it started to look fairly masculine (which as it turns out would have been fine) but I didn't want to appear partizan, so finally I put in the brick red colour, which brightened the whole thing up quite nicely, but completely put an end to any idea of it's being subtle.

The pattern itself is very well written with excellent illustrations, and I had no trouble at all following but, but my god there are a lot of ends to sew in! I tried and tried to find some way of joining as I went, but the tessellation made it difficult to do and anyway I needed to finish all the motifs and lay them out to be sure my colour-scheme worked (it didn't - I had to re-do the central octagon). To be fair, I had seen comments to this effect on Ravelry before I started, but the reality of the situation didn't really hit me until I started joining the motifs. I'd also made a rod for my own back in this respect by not using self-striping yarn, and having several colours in each motif. At a conservative estimate I reckon I sewed in 500 ends, and that's even bearing in mind I worked the partial octagons back and forth, contrary to the pattern, so as to avoid having even more!

Having finally joined all the motifs and sewed in all the ends, and done the edging (for which I had to order yet another ball of yarn - this thing eats it!) I then had to do the owl faces which involved guess what, 10 ends, per owl. I made a bit of a mess of the first one in that the stitching showed through in the back which looked a bit messy, but after that I devised a way of hiding the stitches in the fabric. By this time, however, the whole undertaking had become a race to the finish, despite my nephew obligingly contriving to be nearly two weeks late. And ultimately, when I'd finished, I wasn’t sure that the addition of various boss-eyed avians really improved it. I think on the whole I would have liked it better with just the circles!

Still, its done and I am not unhappy with it. I hope its recipients will like it and find it useful. It is certainly very warm and I will quite miss snuggling under it sewing away at my ends in the evenings. However, it does mean, at long last we will be able to catch up with all those subtitled dramas we've been missing out on in the evenings for the last 2 months. Try as I might I have to look what I'm doing with crochet, in a way I really don't when I'm knitting. So, the blanket is all set to head off to its new home in the morning, and I'm off for a bit of bog-standard stocking stitch and some "Scandi Noir".