Le Knitting Francais

As long as I remember I’ve owned a pink plastic French knitting spool. I’ve always been able to do it, I learned so long ago it’s almost as if I’ve known how to from birth!

How I wish I had one of these instead of my pink plastic one:

When I found my 14 year old square blanket I also found the French knitting spool along with a couple of metres of rope I’d obviously intended to edge it with. I chose a crocheted edging in the end but didn’t want to destroy the hard work I’d put in on the pink spool so decided I was going to carry on.

But, what do you do with French knitting? Other than make several meters of brightly coloured rope?! I’ve started joining it together into another blanket (you know where you are with blankets) with a crocheted slip-stitch but other than that I’m at a loss.

I’ve had a look on the internet and came across this site which has lots of lovely spools but not much to do with the. Does anyone out there do French knitting?

Longest Knitted Project Ever

It has taken me 14 years to finish but I got there eventually. Last night at 11.30pm I looped my last half double crochet edging and it was complete. The patchwork blanket which I started when I was 14.

Don't worry, I'm not the world's slowest knitter, it hasn't taken me 14 years to knit 180 squares. I am, in fact, the world's laziest sewer. The squares have sat in a bag for 14 years, screaming at the back of my mind "join me up you lazy cow!" but only this winter has it been cold enough to motivate me to do it.

I must say I'm quite pleased with the result (it also contrasts quite well with my Stashbusting Crochet Cushion which is making a guest appearance in the bottom right of this photo:

This is essentially another stashbusting project. I used 3.5mm needles, casted on 20 stitches and knitted 20 rows (I impressed myself when I remembered how many stitches I used after all these years when I needed to make a couple more to finish a row). I knitted hundreds of the bloody things, packed them away for 14 years then got them out and sewed them together (I really hate sewing).

I love all the colours, the image is slightly blurry as the flash has gone bonkers. Plus I was very tired at 11.30pm

For the edging I went round once with a single crochet in a nice purple I had left over but it wasn't quite thick enough. I then went round with a half double crochet to make it thicker. I'm pretty pleased with it.After temperatures over the last couple of weeks that never reached zero degrees celcius I was looking forward to snuggling up under the blanket, but today is one of the mildest days we've had in ages. 13 degrees. Typical. I should have packed it away for another 14 years!!

Granny Square blanket

I am more than pleased to have finished my Granny Square blanket. It's really very heavy. Admittedly it doesn't really match the duvet cover but the important thing is that it's warm. It does mess with your head the more you look at it, I think I've inadvertently made one of those magic eye patterns! I used quite a lot of my spare yarn for it but the bigger it got the less of a scrap-busting mission it became. I am pleased with it and as you can see from the picture below Bubba the Bear quite likes it too...