Lizard Ridge

For those who are sick to death of hearing and seeing about my Lizard Ridge, please tune off now. This knit totally consumed me for a while, and to be honest, I'm glad it's over - I really missed socks while I was in it's thrall.I cast the first square on 13th of April, and cast off the last of 24 squares on the 15th of May. That's 24 squares in 32 days - 0.75 squares per day!

The Vintage Hues proved to be a very successful substitute for the Noro. Not only was it 1/3 of the price of Noro, but it meant that I could pick up skeins with a quick trip to the local department store. My LYS had never heard of Noro, let alone stock it, so the Noro was always going to be a problem. The Vintage hues was also a delight to knit with - beautiful texture and colour, very few knots that broke the continuity of colour and I liked the fact that it was from an Australian Company.

The whole knitting process was a breeze. The finishing tripped me up though. I'd always intended to mattress stitch the vertical seams, which worked very successfully, but the horizontal seams were tricky. I tried several methods before I finally settled on picking up stitches through the 2 blocks (right side together) and then casting off. It was a time consuming process, but in the end, I really loved the straight seams it created.

The most frustrating part, which be rights should have been the simplest and quickest was the border. The problems were purely bought about by my own stupidity. I decided on a garter stitch border of 10 - 12 rows, knitting each of the 4 sides individually and mitering the corners and then seaming them. I knit 3 sides before realising that I wasn't going to have enough yarn to get through the fourth side. I put the call out on Ravelry for additional yarn - it was Lambs Pride Worsted - not an easily accessible yarn in Australia. A lovely lady sent me a skein of the same yarn in the same colour, but alas not in the same dyelot. I thought it still might pass muster, but I was unhappy with the colour contrast, so I decided to do a two tone border, so I ripped back each of the the three sides to 5 rows each and joined in the new colour which was still Lambs Pride, but in Wild Plum - a dark purple. I did one long side successfully, but when I went to do the second long side I realised that I had started the border on the wrong side, and the colour change was going to be visible on the right side - argh!! So I had to rip back ALL of the border and start again. The rest went smoothly and in the end I finally finished on the 6th of June. I am VERY happy with this beautiful blanket. It is so colourful and warm and soft, I loike it alot.