Baby blanket

Last summer, my husbands brother (S) and sister-in-law (A) took a trip to Scotland and Ireland. S had been saying that he would be willing to have children after he had taken a trip to the British Isles. So A's parents took them on the trip, in the hopes that they might get grandchildren.


It looks like their plan worked, because S and A's first child will be born in June (gender unknown). That means that I have some knitting to do. I started the tradition of knitting blankets for baby relatives, so S and A's baby will be getting a blanket too.

Because of the history of their decision to have children, I decided that the blanket should have a Celtic feel to it. I also like baby blankets that are reversible.

The first iteration of the blanket is shown below:

I bought some Swish Superwash from Knitpicks in color Dublin (gender-neutral, and the parents really like green).

I took the border from the Arwen sweater (reversible cable) and made it wider. I knit attached I-cord on one side, and a selvedge that would make it easy to pick up stitches on the other side. When the strip was 2 feet long, I picked up stitches and knit the border on both sides, continuing the I-cord up the sides. I put a double seed stitch pattern in the middle. This makes the blanket totally reversible. I am about 25% done with the blanket, but I don't like it. It just looks a bit too messy. I also HATE knitting that border pattern. It's almost constant cabling, and the yarn is on the splitty side, especially since I am knitting it at a fairly tight gauge.

I haven't ripped it out yet, but I have started version 2. Version 2 is worked from the center out, increasing at the four corners of a square. I'll then knit a border on last. I'm trying out some other border ideas (the current idea I'm working on is a reversible honeycomb cable pattern) but I don't have anything worked out yet.

In other news, I've been doing a lot of home improvement projects lately. For some reason, I got the idea that I could do some basic plumbing. I'm really not sure what gave me this idea, since the last time I tried to mess with pipes I was pretty unsuccessful (and ended up having to call a plumber). But so far I've been successful. I've replaced the kitchen faucet and I'm half way through installing a reverse osmosis water purification system. The next step in the reverse osmosis installation involves drilling a hole in a pipe. I'm a bit nervous about that one. Hopefully it goes well!

Can you guess that I've been spending a lot less time on work lately? I've been knitting AND working on the house!