I’ve finished the knitting on the latest fish:

You can see that I used two of the four scale patterns from my last fish post in it, opting instead for plain stripes on the sections that were not divisible by 6 or 3. Now there’s just darning in all those ends, sewing up the tail, and placing the eyeballs. I’m holding off on final completion until I find out from the recipient whether she wants her hat dead or alive.

I also started a new project – a baby blanket worked in modular knitting, along the lines of a traditional log cabin quilt. In typical heedless style, although I’ve seen patterns and descriptions of this style of modular knitting before, I’m not working from a pattern. I’ve got the image of what it should be in my head, and am stumbling towards execution by trial and error.

I’m working in Austermann Batika Color, a cotton/acrylic/nylon blend that came out in 2004. I got a bag of it at Wild & Woolly in Lexington at their annual mid-winter sale, for an excellent price. This is a machine wash/dry flat yarn with an interesting texture – sort of a chainette bound by a tight nylon strand. As you can see, it’s a shaded yarn. Knit normally from horizon to horizon, the grays, creams and blues would make partial row tweedy stripes. Worked in narrow 12-stitch wide bands I’m getting more of an umbral effect.

I like what’s happening with the color blending, and I like the analog to the traditional log cabin quilt block layout. I like the working method more than I thought I would. I’m not fond of the prominent seam ridges formed by using ssk to join. What you see is one night’s work, using up most of one ball of yarn. I’m thinking of ripping it all out and restarting, using a different join method. Possibly the long loop join I used in the Lightning scarf pattern. My fall-back is to do a standard throw using medallions knit out from the center, so that the color changes radiate with each medallion starting in a slightly different spot on the sequence. That would work well for this yarn, too – but would involve lots of sewing up, which I was looking forward to avoiding by using the modular technique.

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