The Blanket Leap

One of the things I like about knitting is the way it invites you to improve and master certain skills while giving you the confidence and inspiration to want to learn more. Like making scarves? Excellent! Plenty of wools and patterns to try and, here in Fairbanks at least, lots of sub-zero days to wrap your neck against. Interested in making socks? Alright then, once you've figured out the gusset and turning the heel, you'll always have an easy homemade gift option.

For me, the most intimidating, exciting, can't-wait-to-make-my-own-type projects have been those larger in scope than something that can sit on your knee. I like making socks because they are portable and unique - any pattern or technique can be transferred to a sock. So I've mastered cables and ribs and even intarsia on a couple pairs of size twos or threes. But I've yearned to make something bigger. More substantial.


Years ago, I knitted my first blanket square. It was easy to do and I cranked out a half-dozen in a few months. Then I faltered. The yarn I was using - while cheap enough to rip and discard when I made an inexorable mistake - didn't feel as nice on my fingers as fine sock gauges. The pieces sat in the cedar chest until after I participated in a group project, knitting a square for a friend's baby blanket. Once I got over the stage fright, the fear of messing something up that would appear in a sea of more accomplished knitters' offerings (mostly by realizing the friend I had dragged into the project with false bravado would kill me if I didn't finish mine), I was drunk with the possibility.

I wanted a blanket of my own. So I dug up those squares. And I gradually added new ones, using the pattern as a sort of template, making up stripey designs, filching others from favorite sock and blanket patterns far too advanced for my experience. Every strange new step of the way, joining squares and crocheting edges, setting pieces aside in a limbo that might not earn me the satisfaction of a finished piece, I just took a chance. Until all my chances, all the mistakes and the rough spots, the weird curved corners and the bumpy segments, all represented by squares of surprisingly soft, textured matter, turned into something real.