WIP Wednesday - Periodic Table Blanket

I feel it is high time that I gave you all an update on this massive project of mine, which has been going on for what feels like forever (I believe it is about ten years...) I seem to go through waves of really getting into the project, and knitting several squares for it, and then not touching it for another several months.

Recently I reached a new milestone for it! I finally completed groups 3 through 12, the biggest number of same coloured squares. For some reason, in past Lottie's infinite wisdom, I used the most eye wateringly offensive shade of neon orange. I really don't know why, I must have been going through something! XD Anyway, with those squares now out of the way I can turn my attention to the remaining groups on the table. Groups 13 through 16 including helium will be in the same colour. But I don't have a colour picked out for them just yet. I am thinking of looking through my stash and seeing what I already have. I know full well that I won't have enough for all the squares I need, but at least I can get that one ball out of my stash before I get a load more to complete that section of the project.

Now with groups 13 through 16 considered and planned out, the only squares left are the Actinides, these I do actually have the yarn for, and are a delightful hot pink - Again. past Lottie, what were you thinking? - Unfortunately that yarn is sitting at my mother's house, and as I write this we are in the middle of a lockdown amidst a global pandemic. There is no chance I'm getting that yarn any time soon.

That all being said the end for this huge project does seem to be in sight. I think if I kept my mind to it then I could start to work my way through the next set of groups, and hopefully it won't be another ten years to finish this project!

To take the photo for this post, I laid all the squares out on my living room floor, and they took up more space than I actually had. There was also a lot of tension changes, which will be fun to deal with when we come to  trying to join all the squares together.

The Lanthanides

Slow but kind of steady progress is being made on the periodic table blanket. It has been a on going project for a little while now, the first post about it here, was from the 3rd of February last year... Oops!

Anyway I have now managed to complete the Lanthanides. Once I've sewn the blanket together I'm going to think about putting the chemical symbols on it.

The lanthanides occupy one of the very bottom lines of the periodic table, and are the rare earth elements. Technically they sit inside the periodic table, between barium and hafnium, but they would look a bit silly there, so they sit along the bottom.

At the moment I'm working through getting some of the squares around the table itself to make it a more rectangular blanket shape. Although the next load of squares to go will be groups 3 to 12, which are mostly metals.

My First Quilt

Font

A little while ago, I thought I would try my hand at quilting. As usual things like college got in the way, but I made the front of a quilt. I made the front out of a fat quarter pack that I got from Hobbycraft, and I created this pattern. Being the engineer I am I did a technical drawing to see how the pattern would look, and to use as a guide as I was making it.

I finished the front fairly quickly, and it got folded up and put in a draw for quite a while. Part of the reason was that I didn't have anything for the back - to be honest I hadn't actually thought that far ahead!

BUT! I did find a little while later another fat quarter pack (they were packs of six), that I figured would go with the front. Then I struggled with what to do on the back. Did I want another busy pattern like the front? Did I want it to be obvious that it was the back? Does the back need to be boring? I really didn't know. So that fabric sat in the draw with the front of the quilt waiting to be put together!

Back

I finally got around to making the back, I decided that as long as I liked the design on the front and on the back, who cared which side was which! The pattern was much more simple, but I think it looks nice, and was nice to sew together.

The next thing to figure out is how to quilt it all together. First of all I need to get the wadding to go in the middle. Which I'm still yet to do, and after that is done I can put a border around it and I will have finally finished it.

Then after this one, I may make another one!

Nicky's Blanket

Everything has been go, but I have managed to get at least one project done this summer! This is Nicky's knee blanket, it may be slightly larger than a knee blanket, but it will certainly keep him warm.

This blanket I've had to keep quiet about when I was making it, as Nicky didn't want to see it before it was made. I've loved making it, and luckily Nicky loves it too.

The blanket was made from a pattern in a book for a baby blanket. It is a simple granny square blanket and was made by just adding more and more rounds. Instead of using the suggested three balls of yarn, I think I did actually use seven... My plan was to make it bigger then a baby blanket, but didn't really think it would be this big.

I used two balls of dark green, two balls of petrol blue and three balls of the pale green colour. I started the centre of the granny square with the pale green colour.

The colour is swapped every two rounds. The centre was the pale green, I then used the dark green, then another two rounds of the pale green, and then two rounds of the petrol blue. Doing it this way gave it a lovely striped pattern and the pale green made sure that the colours of the other two colours didn't drown each other out. But it does mean you use another balls worth of wool.

So in all I made a blanket big enough for a grown man, out of seven 100g balls of DK wool.

Safe to say I think he really likes it. (And yes I did give it to him in a pub.)

Slow But Steady

Apparently wins the race...
This week (I know it's Wednesday but I've lost track of the week already!) I've managed little pieces here and there, but still, not much has rolled out of the factory doors!

I've made a little bit of progress on the Granny Stripe Blanket, it's now a whole three rows taller! (Hopefully more soon as I finish more bits and pieces off) To read more about that one check it out here.

There has been some work done on a lovely pair of legwarmers, which will be making their way here hopefully along with a pattern before too long, so that is to look forward to.

Apart from that, I've been panicking along with a whole ton of work from my Module 11 work, which is why there has been a sad lack of making recently, but hopefully when I get back on top of it all it will begin to pick up the pace again and we'll have lots of lovely made things to share! :)

Granny Stripe Blanket: Scraps and a Hack

For a little while now I've been collecting large lengths of yarn left over from other projects I've finished and balls of yarn that have died, and I've been crocheting them into a blanket.

Blanket and centre pull ball

I decided to try out the granny stripe blanket, I'd seen a few other people do them and they looked really nice. So to try and figure out where to start I had a look at the lovely pattern on Attic24, which is a lovely lovely place to find new things, so go check it out in the link!

What I love about using scraps in this project is, there is no obvious pattern and the colours are random and can come out looking lovely. The beauty of using scraps as well is, you don't have to spend out on yarn especially for it, and there is a lovely feeling of looking at it and seeing all the different bits of projects that you had enjoyed doing before, and it's all brought together in one cozy blanket.

After I got to the end of this little centre pull ball, I thought of an easy way to stop the thing coming unravelled. Years ago I had bought these tiny little hair clips, obviously in a moment of madness. They never stayed in my hair as it is a huge, thick tangled mess most of the time! But once I have used a stitch marker to hold the last loop where I had been working, clipping the tiny hair clip on the end stops that sneaky end trying to pull back through and undo all that work.

My little hair clip hack

Periodic Squares

For a long time I have wanted a patchwork quilt, I also am a sucker for science and used to have a passion for chemistry. So a little while ago I started to create a blanket.

Blanket Pieces Laid Out

For this blanket I have knitted squares, I intend to then so them together and on each square I shall sew on the correct chemical symbol. Progress on this blanket has been very very slow, but today I finished another square, which is one more on the way to the finish. But also, I realised I had no record of what squares I had knitted... I had previously written a chart of the periodic table which I had free handed, and looking back at it I had no clue what was going on and what I had done already. (Some squares were crossed out and others scribbled here and there).

Old Chart and New Chart

So I sat down and I drew out another chart, this time using squared paper and created a second chart that was neat and understandable.

Then was the task of sorting the squares into colour and seeing what bits of the blanket had been done and what was left to do.
Very satisfyingly I was neatly crossing things off the chart and there are now a nice amount of crosses in the boxes.

One of the things I failed to take into account was my eagerness to get the project started when I first settled on the idea, meaning that I have a partly completed blanket that hasn't been knitted to the same pattern. For the majority of the blanket I have been knitting the squares diagonally, in a diamond shape, this means that the square doesn't pull awkwardly in the blanket and it all lies nicely. But in the first column of my periodic table, my squares have been knitted straight and to varying sizes...
Oh well, I will see how this all looks in the end, then I may have to redo some of the start.

The pattern I've used for the square is a simple garter stitch pattern I have explained here: Square Pattern

For my squares I have used size 9 (3.75mm) and all of the wool is double knitting. Each square doesn't take much yarn to produce and one 100g ball gives quite a few squares.