On Lizard Ridge

The moment we've all been waiting for is finally here. After 11 1/2 months, and thirty-five squares, I have finished my Lizard Ridge blanket - "the extended version".

Properly, properly finished, with crochet edging and everything!

Do you want to see how it looks unfolded? I feel there should be a red ribbon to cut, or a curtain to pull aside. In lieu of either, please imagine appropriate levels of brass bands, milky cups of tea and something involving strawberry jam being squashed underfoot. If you could stretch to a lop-sided marquee that would be great.

Without further ado, may I share with you:


My Lizard Ridge. Or as H refers to it "My Blankie".

(I've just looked out the window as I write this and someone in the next village along has just let off a stream of fireworks. Thank you. I'm glad you like the blanket)

Although I knit every stitch and crocheted every crochet, there has been an element of collaboration in this project because it was H who sorted out the order of the squares for me. When I finished the last square over a week ago and laid it all out on our lounge floor I crept into bed and whispered pitifully "I've finished. But I'm not sure I'm going to like it". The boy replied "just wait until I've finished with it" and told me to go to sleep.

The next evening he started re-laying the squares, bringing his art eye to the equation. He started by trying to organise the squares into swathes of colour so that they ran from orange in one corner to blue in the other with green in the middle and everything else all around. Once he had done that he started mixing them up a bit, with both of us swapping around pairs of squares.
The blanket sat on our floor in squares for three days before we decided that we had the final set up. One trick that we used quite a bit was to take pictures of the blanket on a black and white setting to check the balance of the blanket. I can't remember where I heard that suggestion but it really works.


This is the final blanket arrangement and you can see that there isn't really any one area that is disproportionately dark or light.

To keep the order I pinned it all together with quilt pins and sewed each seam 'in situ', removing the pins as I came to them. I seamed the squares into bigger squares and then joined them all together with three long horizontal seams. Contrary to my expectations, I found it easier to sew the horizontal seams because there was less pressure to make sure that the stripes were matching up. In every vertical seam, one of the edges will be the edge that you carried the colour up and it is incredibly easy to count the carried yarn as part of the two 'bars' for mattress stitch, you just have to keep an eye on it.

I also discovered that on at least two squares I'd missed out a bit of short rowing so I had to ease them in. It isn't noticeable in the finished blanket and even I would have to look pretty carefully to remember which squares they are.

I found the best thing to sew up with is leftover sock yarn, it's very smooth and strong so it slides through the Noro easily and you can give it a good yank to pull the two edges together.



The crochet edging took me from Tuesday evening to last night. For a non-crocheter it was a surprisingly easy edging. The first row is just a set up row and the second was easy enough once I got into the flow of it. I should stress that this is what I think the crochet instructions say to do, and it is an edging that looks quite like the one in the picture; but I am by no means a proficient crocheter so I make no promises that I have read the pattern correctly. It looks good, and that's all that really matters.

For the edging I used Noro Cash Iroha in a deep blue, colour 7 (the same as I used for a Christmas Hat) . It's one of Noro's few solid colours but it picks up on so many of the colours in the blanket and gives a lovely unified feeling to the whole. It also has 20 % cashmere which makes the edges extra soft and snuggly under the chin.

I used two balls for the entire edging, and had 22g left of the second ball.

Ever since I started sewing it up I've wondered whether, and to what extent I should block; thoughts not unrelated to the size of the blanket, the length of time it would take to dry, and our available space and towels. A number of people have said how much the egg-carton texture adds to the blanket and I've seen that a number of finished blankets on Ravelry have been left 'au natural'.



Final decision made by H: egg cartons all the way. The only blocking I have done is to steam the edges to stop them curling and to finish the crochet to it's best advantage. I simply pressed the edges under a damp tea towel with the iron on the wool setting. Because that also blocked part of each of the outer squares, the blanket has a slightly flared look at the moment as the blocked blanket is going to be bigger than the unblocked for obvious reasons. It isn't a pronounced flare and when it's tucked up around you on the sofa, who's going to notice. If I decide that I would like it to be fully blocked then I can wait for a hot sunny day (fingers crossed) and block it on the lawn.

The blanket is plenty big enough as it is - I'm 6' tall and I can sit on the sofa with my toes tucked up and the top edge snuggled up under my chin. For a sense of scale, this:



Is a king size bed. And this:



Is a sofa smothered in blanket. Which is where I am headed right now. Possibly to look at blanket books - you just can't have too much of a good thing you know!

In conclusion, my top tip for Lizard Ridge blankets:

Go and knit one NOW!!

Playing catch up in 4000 words

Somewhere from within my haze of internet-deprived petulance that manifested itself as my last post I think I mentioned that my weekend looked a little like this:


My evenings now look like this:

As I crochet my way slowly around the edge of the blanket. Since the picture was taken I have finished round one and made four blobs for round two - progress indeed and I can start to see why it is worth doing.

I have also been greatly assisted by (a)


A happy side effect of being married to my husband. There is something about that man that makes our relatives provide him with cake parcels. My mother makes him chocolate sponge cake and his grandmother recently sent us a shiny gold shoe box full to the brim with long thin bricks of goodies wrapped in greaseproof paper. These are her millionaire's shortbread and even though she gave us her recipe I am the first to admit that I cannot make them as well as Gran.

What makes it even funnier, and proves that not only is he giving off "send me cake" vibes, but more precisely, "send me good cake" vibes, is that the first batch were deemed by Gran to be below par, so she handed them out to H's cousins as treats for them and immediately set about making a fresh batch for him. I am allowed a piece if I have been really good!

and (b)

The second 'crochet edging incentive' is a recent discovery resulting from Hotel Chocolat's delightful idea to have a shop in Birmingham next to Borders. I went for a walk at lunchtime and just happened to stroll in. Once I'd been given my 'welcome to the shop' chocolate - a praline heart patterned with songbirds and leaves - I melted; and came home with these, cherries soaked in kirsch and dipped in chocolate. If you like Ben and Jerry's Cherry Garcia ice-cream (or the oh so much healthier frozen yoghurt), these are for you.

Stitched up

My at-home internet has again disappeared down a hole into the ether. We had hard-wired internet on Saturday, we tried to move it to the other computer on Sunday and it wouldn't go. We tried to move it back to the first computer and it still wouldn't go. We bribed and corrupted a friend who knows about all things technical to come and have a look at it and he couldn't make it go.

We are left with the option that (a) a very tiny telephone line failure has happened just outside our house so that the telephone works and the internet doesn't. This is not as far fetched as it seems; the last time it all disappeared on us it was a fault inches outside our door which meant that BT thought the line was fine and we knew we were calling on a mobile because the phone didn't work; or (b) something in the vast amounts of wire currently trailed around our home went ping when we moved the cable to the other computer. According to H, the fact that our hard wired gadgets are the most basic possible makes this unlikely as it means that there is less to go wrong. I retain a healthy scepticism about that theory but would be prepared to go with it if the internets would be similarly co-operative.

My contribution to proceedings was to run up and down checking whether the little flashy light had stopped flashing and to scowl at the computer and demand that it pull its finger out and start working. There may have been a teeny foot stamp to accompany the scowl. In my defence, the little flashy light has developed a malevolence that can only be attributed to something capable of independent thought; it will stop flashing for the briefest of moments, just enough time to click the connect button ..... and then die and go back to flashing. I love it not.

All of this separation anxiety did manifest itself in a need to curl up under something lovely - I have spent the weekend sewing, and the Lizard Ridge blanket is as one. I'll tell more when I can show pictures because it is pretty and soft and warm and I can frequently be found wearing it as a giant shawl!

Finally

I take a pause from the biggest sewing-up job ever known to mankind to share, at long last, the final three Lizard Ridge Squares.

These are all mongrel squares, although some are more mongrel than others! However, as an equal opportunity Lizard Ridge square creator, they do all still get names.


This is Trondheim - it's the name of a town on the fjords about 2/3rds of the way up Norway and I was lucky enough to sail there from Scotland many years ago. It was the height of summer, scorching hot and the fjords had that very saturated deep blue that only a great depth of water can convey. We would sail close to the shore looking for somewhere to anchor and be continually double checking the depth reader as we found ourselves still beyond the reach of our anchor chain but almost close enough to reach out and touch the pine trees.



This is probably the least mongrel of the lot and is very similar to the Kir Royale square. It isn't quite the real thing though so it is the Heart of Fire from the Mystery of the Blue Train - where all isn't quite what it seems either!

And finally:


This final square has always had a name, regardless of colour or inspiration. When we last drove back from the Western Isles we took a scenic route through the mountains down to Glasgow. After a little drive climbing what seem to be (from your side) gentle hills, you come to a place which is marked in the atlas as a village and is in reality a National Trust of Scotland car park. Below you the valley opens up and the road snakes away down the steep slopes. It ranks very highly in my list of top place names. It is called:

Rest and be Thankful


And I am. 35 squares knit, many seams sewn and many more still to sew and it looks prettier every seam.

And finally, seeing as it is Valentine's day:



I started a sock. In pink and white Peppermint Cheer. Happy Valentine's Day.

Disconnected

It is with great sadness that I report the believed death of another not-very-beloved-because-it-died-on-us modem. We have been without the internets intermittently last week and permanently since Friday morning. I found to be a period of great turmoil characterised by sadness and withdrawal and H, who works from home and needs the internets to do even a tiny part of his job, found mildly inconvenient!

It did mean that when my net connection to my office died on Thursday afternoon I got more of a snow day than I originally planned although in the long term, and I know it is sacrilege to say this in the presence of still-present snow, I could have done with getting a bit more work done.

We quickly forget how much we rely on being able to just look things up - H has spent today marmalising BT, Tesco and chatting up Sky to get a good deal on replacement broadband, but had to call me at work to get the numbers, and it took a while to find a number that led to a real person. On a side note, a hint to Tesco internet - having a website that tells you whether there is a known fault with your broadband connection is about as much use as an e-mail telling you the e-mail is broken (a favourite with office IT departments the world over).

Anyway, I'm here (illicitly established on H's work computer which is harnessed directly to the main phone socket by more tele-cabling than you'd think could be present in one house); flickr is working its way through my pictures from the last few days, and I have glorious knitting to share.

Would anyone like to hazard a guess as to what these are:


I'm going to miss knitting these squares - these are numbers 29-31 inclusive. Their honour is that they are the final four squares to be knit from colourways known to Noro as opposed to mongrel colourways of my own invention. They are all from Web of Wool (as are the vast majority of the squares in the pile)

In order of knit:


#205. I don't fish but in my mind, this is the colour of river fishing - we've got the green waders, the colours of weeds in the stream, the bright blue and green of a carefully tied fly, and the minty green of water slipping over fish scales. In homage to my everlasting love for all things Arthur Ransome, this is The Cachalot.


#52. I love the complexity of the colours in this square - from a distance it looks very muted and a little muddy but closer up you can see the tweedyness (is that a word?) of the yarn that is the hallmark of good Noro. The colours are of western Scotland, and whilst I'd love to carry on the Ransome theme, and call this one Great Northern it is instead Etive, the name of a loch and a mountain and the home of a favourite uncle and aunt, reminiscent of brackeny walks to see mountains stretching away to an icy connection between land and sky, and views of mossy grey castles butting up to steely lochs reflecting the clouds above.


All of our pictures of our trip north last March are taken in shadow, but all are full of a dank saturated colour. It was beautiful.


#236. I'm seriously considering this colour as a contender for the edging - it's got blue, flashes of lime green, lots of my favourite orange and a hint of purple - what's not to like? This square is a Turkish mosaic - my mother had a set of cards with these wonderful gold and blue and orange Turkish patterns; I loved them and she used to send them to me when I was at university.

And our final honour for the day goes to #124 - its name is Kir Royale - the reason:



Kir Royale Blackcurrant Champagne truffles from Hotel Chocolat - a serious weakness of mine!

So, only three more squares to knit before H and I get to play jigsaw puzzles with all the squares and my gargatuan sewing-up fest begins - maybe we'll need a Lizard Ridge blanket each.....

Last of the Americans

At the very great risk of further endangering Mandy's credit card - I've knit a couple more squares, and they are no less beautiful than the first 25!



I think that this is colour #199 and its name is Spinnaker because it reminds me of watching the yachts race in the bay as a child. If we were really lucky the turning mark was dropped close under the cliff in front of us and we would spend the whole day on the terrace watching and listening to the boats round the mark and send up wonderful, giant, and usually highly fluorescent spinnies before setting off for the down wind leg towards the lighthouse.

We could also hear crystal clear the skipper's comments if the kite didn't go up as smoothly as it should have done but that's a story for another day.


With all of these bumps in the sail perhaps it is a spinny on a badly sailed boat?

And now for the last of my 7 balls of American Kureyon:

# 236. It seems only appropriate that the final American square should have an American name so this is Winter Park, which is not too far from Sip n Knit Maitland where this yarn originated. It's really the boat trip that we took on the lakes around Winter Park; the orange-yellow is Rollins College buildings, the stone colour is all the houses around the lake, the blue is the water and the green is all of the trees which overhang as you motor through the canals between the different lakes.

Most appropriately of all, we spent the boat trip wrapped up in blankets to keep the wind off!

So here we have it, my American 8, from first to last, giving me a total of 27 squares knitted:


I'm on the homeward stretch and the leftovers of these colours will end up in other mongrel squares so we're not done yet.

8 squares to go - you know where I'll be and what I'll be doing.

Three of the best

Fear not gentle reader, lest it appear that my recent forays into spinning (mmm! spinning) and quilting (oooh, quilting) have destracted me from my true purpose in life; the knitting of Noro Lizard Ridge squares; for it has not:



These three may be in the running for my most favourite squares of all - my favourite kind of burnt orange, velvety purple, olive green and a splash of lime - what's not to like?



What is perhaps not at first apparent is that these are all the same colour - Noro 185 - a colourway so wonderful that we bought it twice; at least, we bought two balls, the only time we did a 'repeat' when shopping Stateside.

The great tragedy of this colour is that Noro don't supply it to the UK. How could they deprive us so unfairly - it's probably the first Kureyon that I've seriously considered knitting a garment from as opposed to hats, scarves and blankets. I'm going to have to start petitioning Noro- it's really the only way.

Given that I seem to have been naming my squares as I go along, I spent some time watching the yarn and waiting for the associations to jump out at me and as I did that I couldn't shake the feeling that it was something to do with wine. Sure, there was a deep purple, and a claret red, but where did the orange fit in, and the lime splash wasn't really leaf green.

And then it struck me. I've been stalking Holiday Yarns' website (formerly Vancalcar Estates - purveyors of the Tsock Tsarina's routes to madness, sorry I mean sock kits) waiting for the right moment in the family fortunes to place a little order (and watching the pound crash against the dollar in the meantime) and the colours of the Noro are the colours of one of the socks that my mouse hovers over every time.

The name of these three squares .... is Vintage.

(PS - I placed the order - it seemed only fitting. Also my mouse hand may have slipped over Poseidon and the Nine Tailors - yippee!!)

The Noro Virus

(with apologies to anyone who has an upset stomach and got here by accident)

Type: Disease
Textbook symptoms: compulsive knitting of the Lizard Ridge pattern characterised by a continued repetition of the phrase "just one more row; look, it's changing colour!" and the need to use the Noro to the exclusion of all other yarns, including handspun sock yarn.

Other discernible symptoms:

• detailed examination of the internet to discover what other Noro colours exist and the planning of excuses which could lead to trips to those stockists.
• continued protestations that a finished blanket/house cozy is "really needed because it's cold", when the thermometer has been above zero for several days.
• the acquisition of a set of digital scales, ostensibly to help with accurate fibre division for spinning; used mainly to acquire statistical data as to the weight of each Lizard Ridge square.
• application of that statistical data to the leftovers to see how many more balls might be needed/validly acquired by the patient.
• trying to pass off each finished square as knitted art to H, a real artist.

Treatment: Alas, no cure has yet been discovered but physicians may reassure the patient and families that no long term damage appears to be caused by this virus and it is not life threatening. The virus has been known to abandon the host on the completion of 'the project' but is more likely merely to enter a dormant phase, activated by the patient making fingertip contact with the Noro.

However, as the virus results in a plethora of hand-knitted items, those in warmer areas might be advised to consider moving further north, or investing in air conditioning/ a very large fridge.

I've finished two more squares:



This one is colour 188 and it is a Blackcurrant bush - from the bottom you get dusty soil with wood ash, then the fallen over-ripe berries on the ground, then the leaves interspersed with levels of berries, getting riper as you get nearer the top.


This one, 229, is harder to classify - I love the colours and I've not seen this colourway in the UK. I think it is the archetypal jewel tones; emeralds, sapphires, rubies and amythests; it's the handful I imagine at that crucial moment when Julia examines the tennis racquet in Cat Among the Pigeons, so I'm calling it a Good Wife's Weight. It is one of the prettiest squares yet.

And trust me - there are more to come.

Noro rush

It may not have passed unnoticed by regular readers of this blog that I am more than a trifle partial to the loveliness that is Noro yarn. Recently I have waxed lyrical about the wonders and softness of Silk Garden, and the deep deep blue of Cash Iroha as they twisted and turned themselves into Christmas presents for friends and family.

However, it was a little over a year ago that I got my first baptism by Noro when a group of us made Lizard Ridge squares for a friend's baby, and it is 11 months since that double whammy of yarn and pattern led me to cast on for a Lizard Ridge of my very own.

I started off at a great pace but when I picked up the Noro needles again in December it'd been a while since any wannabe egg cartons had emerged from my needles. Definitely time to remedy the situation, and I had an incentive.

New yarn. New American Noro to be precise. Actually, if we're going to be exact about this, Noro in colours that I have not seen in the UK (hee hee!).

So far I have knitted 22 Lizard Ridge squares (if you include the one I just finished this evening). H and I are both tall, and there's nothing worse than a blanket that you can't wrap your toes in and still tuck under your chin so I think we're going the whole hog and adding an extra 'repeat' - a 7 x 5 blanket, rather than 6 x 4. It's a combination of eeek and yippee, more yarn!

The latest squares are some of my favourites:

An English 164 (I think - I lost the label). This is another artistic interpretation of the sea meets the land - a turquoise sea meets sandy beaches, gorse bushes and the cliff




The first of my American Noro squares - this is 175 and it says hot slightly scorched English roses on a totally still August afternoon; that moment when the blooms just start to droop their heads.



Another English square - 173 - it's a swimmer in a bright red cossie cleaving through a pool with that funny wiggle tile on the bottom



A mongrel square - pieced together with leftovers and looking oddly more united than some of the main squares - this is sunrise over the vale of Evesham on the road to Tewskbury the first Christmas that I drove home from Warwickshire really early in the morning, I woke up early and left early because I was nervous about the long drive and it wasn't until I got to Evesham that the sun appeared through the valley, rising above a sparkling silver mist.



According to my Ravelry notes I started this blanket on 6 March 2008 and it would be nice to think that I could finish it by 6 March 2009. I'm not putting any kind of deadline down because as we know that dooms me either to failure or to multiple late nights to get it finished, neither of which is something that I'm prepared to contemplate right now. Instead, lets just say that it would be nice to finish it in time to untuck myself from it to greet the spring - whenever that may be.

Ugggh

Hello, remember me?

I know it doesn't sound very like me, in fact, it sounds like someone auditioning for the lower bass part of a male voice choir (with occasional percussional coughs) but I have an excuse.

I have had The Bug (tm) which does the round of every office with eccentric air conditioning every summer (actually I think I got it spending four hours in a car with the husband of someone with The Bug and another colleague who had only just returned to work from having The Bug.

The Bug is not nice - as I got ready for work on Monday I happened to mention to H that I was feeling a little poorly; he opened an eye and suggested that given my delicate grey-green colouring I should perhaps stay home. So I did, and the next day, and the next. On Thursday I went in to go to a meeting and then my boss pretty much sent me home to work for the rest of the week - it's been a bit bizarre. Worst of all, when I was feeling ill - I didn't want to knit (this shows the true horror of The Bug).

I did manage to finished the first Cleopatra's Stocking:


But although I finished it on Tuesday it's only been today, Saturday, that the idea of starting the second one hasn't made me slightly queasy. I don't think it helped that my befuddled and feverish brain kept making mistakes and not noticing for say, another 30 rounds. Hopefully the second one will go a little faster.

Happily I discovered that the pattern for Lizard Ridge Squares is so firmly implanted in my brain I can keep churning them out when my brain has toddled off on its own for a bit so we have:

1:

2:

3:

and 4:

see, four squares, all the same colour but all different.

This gives me a grand total of - well this many squares:

Seventeen in fact

- and I have two more balls and 110g of scraps so I think there are another 4ish squares to come from the yarn I have. This would mean I was quite close to the finish but...

H and I have decided that we should go for a 5 x 7 blanket rather than a 6 x 4 given that we're both lanky so I've a few more to go - pink and orange I think!

I must now go and mourn the fact that we have just had the last (brilliant but rather sad) episode of Doctor Who until the Christmas Special

Happy Knitting!