Mattress Stitch and a Discount!

So I'm sending my afternoon doing some finishing work.I know not every knitter will like this but I love mattress stitch. It's so magical how stitch stitch stitch and wham! 

Now, it didn't always work so smoothly. My very first seaming was on the sleeve of a baby sweater. I didn't use stitch markers to make sure things were lined up and when I got towards the end of the seaming, I was off by about 6 stitches. These days I'm able to follow it with my eyes a lot better and tend to use the stitch markers just when I'm seaming something odd shaped, like setting in a sleeve. 

Recently, I got the opportunity to take Craftsy's Seaming Handknits class. It was a great refresher and gave me a lot of tips I hadn't thought of or used before. Because I do enjoy finishing work, some of my patterns require the use of seaming or grafting and this class would be great to try if you have never done that kind of finishing before.  If you're interested in taking that class, use the link above and you will get the class for 25% off! 

And in case you're wondering, I'm working on a second sample of Pacific Grove. The other had an unfortunate incident with the washing machine. 

Finishing

All the pictures in the post were taken on Thursday, about halfway through finishing (post-seaming, pre-weaving bind off ends in/I-cord). You'll see how most photos in my house can quickly turn into a doggy photo shoot. 

One of the things I was dreading most about the Mitered Squares Blanket was the finishing. Not only is there the joining of four small mitered squares (using two colors per square) and then the log cabin sections of each large square, you are making at least 10 or more squares. Then you must join all the squares. If you use a three-needle bind-off that's three ends of yarn per join. Once all your squares are joined (in my case, 13) you'll want to weave in the joining ends, because hopefully you had the forethought to (mostly) knit in your ends as you were working. 

So you've joined and woven ends. Seems like you'd be done, right? Not quite. There's still the I-cord border. Now this is totally optional. However, without it, the blanket doesn't seem quite finished. I-cord is mostly slow going. For every three stitches you knit, you're only actually doing one off the blanket. 

 

I dread finishing in pretty much all cases. I'm a product knitter. I'm in it for the item. So to still be working on this almost a year later makes it hard for me to remain motivated. I spent all of Tuesday, Wednesday, and part of Thursday seaming this bad boy up. I even had a nightmare that Adam put my blanket away and somehow unseamed all my squares! I sewed in ends Thursday and cast on for the I-cord but didn't get a whole lot of progress going on that part. Today, I've spent several hours working on the I-cord and am this close to being finished. I have about three sides of squares left to finish. But, it's getting late (it's actually Saturday already) and my knitting group is headed to the Great Lakes Fiber Festival tomorrow. I had wanted to finish this blanket before I bought more yarn there since I bought all the grey yarn for this blanket there last year, but I'm so close I'm sure I'll be able to finish this sometime over the long weekend. 

Just in time for 90 degree weather.