March 31, an accomplishment

I'm very excited today, because I finished a major project, always a good feeling. Knitters have a term called "stash yarn," yarn that has sat around the house long enough to escape inclusion in any number of knitting projects, sometimes yarn that's never going to see the light of day. This is a stash yarn project, getting rid of a skein of plain white acrylic and purple vareigated mystery yarn (I think also acrylic) that I balled up in Champaign three years ago and promptly forgot about. I love, love, love the color of the purple, but I just wasn't wild about the texture or the way it would feel against skin. I made a funky scarf and hat for M's mom with a bit of it, but it was a very large skein. 

So I made a baby blanket with it, striping white and purple, and using a very simple pattern that's often used to make dishcloths. It's 32 inches on a side, knitted diagonally, and though I had to cheat my head off at the end to get the second white corner to match the first, it ended up really looking nice. Today I'll be putting it in the wash for the first time, to make sure it holds up. Acrylic is both good and bad for baby blankets, bad because it is not as flame retardant as wool and can have a texture that it a bit rough. I would not use it for, say, pajamas. But it can be machine washed, which is essential for a mostly-white baby blanket. I considered washing in a net bag or something like that, but when I am totally honest with myself, no person who actually needs a baby blanket (to wit: the parent of a small child) is going to have time to hunt out a net bag when the baby's just barfed. If the blanket can't take the heat, it needs to stay out of the layette. But I'm pretty confident it will do well.