A Face to the Project

Two weeks ago Tuesday, my cousin was born. This little girl is the recipient to the ever so daunting baby blanket that I am knitting.

This little girl is very special because she was a surprise. Out of all the grandchildren in our family, my 19 year-old sister was the youngest. This little girl's sisters are twins and 23 years-old. So you can imagine the idea of a new baby girl is very exciting to our family. Thus I am trying to

knit her a very special baby blanket that expresses something about our family.

Here is the picture of what the blanket is supposed to look like. However, I have had a difficult time getting ahold of the pattern so I have had to improvise. I have chosen to do it in panels with four being seed stitch and three being the cables and diamond cables. I have currently finished thetwo outside panels and am almost done with one of the thicker middle inside panels that are all seed stitch. I have done all of these over three weeks working very vigorously, especially when I found out that my cousin was born. I have also been using a mint green color to emphasize the Irish baby blanket. This is what I have accomplished thus far.

However, after working so diligently I found myself getting very bored with the same stitch worked over 900 rows. I believe if the math is correct, i have stitched almost 15,300 seed stitches. I pride myself on being able to start a project and see it through, but I really just wanted to put this down and not pick it up for at least another month. However, I don't really have that option since it is a Christmas present. Therefore, I had to come up with something that would give me a break, but not overtly distract me from the big project. So I decided I would knit myself a scarf, since I have yet to knit myself anything. I figured it would give me some gratification and a short break. So I went to the store and found some yarn that I really liked. I found some beautiful multicolord green, yellow, and teal alpaca yarn. Over the weekend, I have almost finished this scarf and am ready to get back to work on the baby blanket. I learned a valuable lesson about myself and how I work on projects. I was able to get one project done, while taking a break from a larger one and still am on schedule for finishing my cousin's baby blanket.