Guess what? I decided to make this blanket extra long and so… It took me a bit longer than a month to knit this blanket. To be honest, this almost finished knitted blanket has been sitting in a storage container for almost a month. Why? I haven’t gotten around to adding the knitted border.
I had every intention of adding that border shortly after the blanket part was complete, but… here I am almost a month later and it’s a project that needs to be finished. Why am I knitting a border? Since this blanket is so plain (I love the simplicity of the garter stitch) I’ve decided to add a border.
While knitting this blanket, I was still trying to decide on the type of border that I wanted to use. I thought about a crocheted scalloped border but immediately nixed that idea immediately. I like crocheted borders, but it’s how I finished my first knitted blanket and I decided I wanted something different and… I wanted this border to be knitted. When thinking about knitted borders, I thought about adding a lace border and so I searched and searched and searched for the appropriate knit border for my hand-knit blanket. I stumbled upon many lovely lace borders, but I didn’t find the one that clicked for this project (at least for me) and so I kept looking. I decided that I wasn’t going to knit a lace border, instead, I started searching for knitted cable borders. I discovered a lot of fancy cables that I’ve bookmarked, but I’ve ultimately decided to choose the knitted cable border that’s shown below.
Do you want to know something interesting? In my search for knit borders, the border I chose is one of the first borders that popped on my search page. It’s Rachel Rabbit’s Continuous Cable Border pattern. It takes advantage of short rows, which means my final bind-off will only be a few stitches. Not that a long bind-off bothers me at all, it doesn’t.
I purchased it on Etsy for $6.00. She also has a tutorial, for the knitted cable border, on her website. This will be the first time that I’ve picked up stitches on a knit blanket, then again… this is only the second hand-knit blanket that I’ve made. I’m sure there will be plenty of firsts as I knit more blankets. Of course, this means this will add more time to this blanket project before it’s finished and I’m fine with that. With crafting, I enjoy the process, the time spent to create an item isn’t important. This hand knit garter stitch blanket doesn’t really need a border, I could bind it off and call it a wrap. However, I do want to add “something extra” to this knitted garter stitch blanket.
Once completed, this will make the second blanket I’ve knit this year. My 2018 goal, is to knit three blankets before the year ends. It looks like I’ll be able to easily reach that goal. I really do enjoy knitting a large project and so I would not be surprised if after completing my third blanket for 2018, I’ll be creating another blanket.