30 Day Knitting Challenge Day 7: Your least favorite [project]?

My least favorite project is a blanket I made for my Mom & stepfather using Lion Brand Homespun. I named the Ravelry project O, the horror and it’s one of two projects I have marked as ugh! (the other one was a sweater I started & frogged, details here).

First off, I will never knit with Lion Brand Homespun again if I can help it (although thinking about it, a friend did give me her stash, including 2 skeins of Homespun). It’s an acrylic-polyester blend and it actually has a distinct sound, kind of a squeek when it rubs against itself. In contrast, wool rubbing against itself has a deeper sound and smooth yarns, like some other acrylics, don’t have much of a sound when rubbed against itself. Not only that, but Homespun splits easily, which I managed to do often while making this blanket.

In addition to all of that, the yarn is (I think) spiral plied; a thick single is plied with a thinner single in a way that bunches up the thick single, almost like a bouclé, and gives this yarn a unique texture. Unfortunately, when one splits the yarn and gets frustrated, one can also break this thin single and change the structure of the yarn for a few inches. One then continues to knit bravely through those inches, then sees that the stitches look wonky, and one has to put the project down and walk away or risk burning it all with the heat of one’s rage because things are not going as well as one would like.

Phew – flashbacks.

The blanket is knit square by square then seamed together. If I recall correctly, the squares are all the same and the pattern emerges when you piece them all together. Well, the seaming was difficult, again because the yarn is splitty and also because at the time I was pretty bad at seaming garter stitch. I whipstitched all the squares together and buried the ends in a way that made part of the seam lumpy and bulky.

Long after I finished the project and gifted it to my parents, which they loved and appreciated, I noticed that I pieced the blanket together incorrectly. The center zig zag is broken, as is the zig zag in the upper left corner. I felt like I fought this thing from start to finish and in the end, it won.

Thankfully, I haven’t seen the blanket in years. I’m not sure if Mom and Dave still have it somewhere or if Dave lost it on the road (he’s a retired trucker), and I don’t want to ask because I don’t want to know. It’s best to let sleeping dogs lie.