A Blanket already!

I’d love to say I’m such a Super-Knitter that I whisked this one up last night…

But that would be a fib!

I love my Work-in-Progress Box!!!  This is a large chest which lives in the sitting room and in it go unfinished projects, designs which don’t seem to be working, and so on.  But last night it turned into one of those Magic Boxes which provide exactly what’s needed.  I went into the box to see if there was something in it which could be frogged for its wool to make a blanket for Pakistan.  (I know, I know, how can someone with a wool business not have wool?  But I’m now completely out of our own wool until it’s been spun and this year I’ve been destashing like mad to charity projects, new knitters, etc. and have very little basic standard good blanket wool).  Anyway, in the Box I found this!  It was a blanket of exactly the right size which had somehow worked its way to the bottom.  When I pulled it out, I remembered that I’d been crocheting it up when my crappy plastic hook broke, so it went into the box until I got round to getting another hook.  Then I forgot it.   And it has a bit of a Story…

The square in the centre was one of the last bits of knitting I did in Oxford.  When we moved, it wasn’t the straightforward put-things-in-truck-and-head-for-new-home thing.  We moved north in a hurry (Graham had been made redundant & Dad was beginning to be ill), to a small flat because Johnby Bank was pretty ruinous.  My brother & some friends needed somewhere to live for a year in Oxford, so we rented the house to them, while Graham & I started renovating here.  When Henry moved out of the Oxford house, I then went down to get it ready to sell.  For the sake of our neighbours in the street, we wanted to do our best to sell it as a family home, since so much around was becoming either student or DSS temporary accommodation (next door was a brothel for a while).  So I was determined to try and present it at its best, which wasn’t easy since most of the nice furniture & stuff was north by then.  It was a very nice house, but It didn’t look very homely and I couldn’t do things with fruit bowls & flowers etc because I was heading north again, so it would be empty till sold and rotting fruit & dead flowers wouldn’t be very appealing.

So I decided knitting-in-a-basket would add that homely touch (and, as a fruit substitute, walnuts in bowls).  My knitting project at the time was an entrelac cushion in chenille as a farewell present for Naseem, but that would be finished by the time I left.  I needed something which I wasn’t going to get too obsessed about because it was going to be left behind.  I’d got a lift down to Oxford & was travelling light with no knitting books & so I rang June and asked her for an interesting pattern to do.  She dictated the lattice pattern over the phone.  So I made the square, left it on the needles & put it in a pretty basket in the middle of the sitting room.  It took a while for anyone to come even to look at the house, but eventually a lovely couple did and they put in an offer straightaway.  They were already friends with some of the neighbours which was wonderful.  (And the estate agent mentioned that the lady had homed in on the knitting in its basket as soon as they went in!)

After we moved into Johnby Bank, the square started becoming part of an on-going blanket, until the crochet hook broke.  The rest of the wool is all from our local mountain sheep – there’s Herdwick ewe, Swaledale, some Hebridean from the sheep who live at Caldbeck, and someone’s very beautifully hand-spun Herdwick hogg (which was left in a bag for the knitting group at the Bluebell Bookshop, so no idea who spun it).  Last night I finished crocheting it up.