Around and Around I went...

but now I've stopped.  And this is the result.

My new sofa blanket.  Or perhaps more accurately, the dog's new sofa blanket, since all blankets in this house automatically belong to the dog, in the same way all beanbags, soft furnishings and beds belong to her.  :)   She was asleep elsewhere in the house at the time of the photo shoot which is probably the only reason why it doesn't sport a canine model on top of it. 

You can see how well it works with the sofa cover/beanbag cover and its lovely and squooshy and warm.  For all its size it was a relatively quick knit as its only taken a couple of months to do, and that was in between sewing, spinning and a variety of other distractions.  

I used James C Brett Marble Chunky, an acrylic yarn that comes in massive 200 gramme balls and a variety of colours.  As its sort of variegated yarn, and comprises two plies of differing colours, it produced a blanket with a lot more colour interest than a plain yarn would have done.  It took two full balls of the green, a full ball of the pink, and I have a fair bit of the brown leftover as it wasn't used for one of the very large outside stripes which did take a lot of yarn.  I didn't count up but I reckon toward the end I had about 550 - 600 stitches on the needles, using two cables screwed together with connectors, about a 2 metre cable length of thereabouts and it was knit on 6mm KnitPicks Pro needles. 

Anyway, I am very, very pleased with it.  It is square, but the strange angle I had to take the photo at (stood part way up the stairs) means that the perspective is a bit off and the foreground part looks a little wider than the background. 

And now back to the shawl that I cast on at around the same time as this blanket, which has been sadly neglected of late. 

I forgot to say in my last post, the fabric store that I went to in Preston was Abhakhan Fabrics.  Always worth a trip to any of their stores if you are in the UK, and they do have stores in several locations.    Although a fair bit of fabric is on the bolt, I particularly love their baskets of fabric remnants to purchase by weight.  The black linen look and the brown double sided knit both came from the baskets, whilst the boiled wool was a rare (for me) purchase from the bolts.  I've had some very nice quality fabrics from them at various times and I always head straight for the wool suiting and knit fabric baskets for a rummage.  I've even had Super120's wool and cashmere suiting out of the baskets .... only once, but you only need to find something like that once in order to encourage a very detailed and careful dig through the entire basket on every visit.