Dentist appointment today.  Though I don’t loathe them like some people do, there’s still enough annoying … digging … that I need my pacifier – i.e., my knitting.  I was working on socks once while waiting for the novacaine to take effect, and my dentist said, “You’re going at that pretty hard.  Nervous, are you?”

Today, the assistants in the office asked right off where my knitting was.  And oh yeah, I did bring it along – this time the old no-brainer scrap sock yarn blanket.

I’ve mentioned this project before.  It’s the one that’ll probably take me three years to finish, but it fills a need.  If you’re a non-knitter, let me explain.  Dedicated sock knitters are fanatics.  I mean, we always have at least three different sock patterns going at one time, and when we see sock yarn we love, we buy it.  So the stash grows into something larger than we’ll ever get through in a lifetime.  Add to that the bits of yarn leftover from each pair of socks we knit, and you’re talking a lotta yarn.

Hence this blanket.  It’s made of mitered squares that look complicated but are not.

Each square requires roughly 10 yards (that’s the distance from fingertips to nose, measured ten times), and one square builds on another by picking up stitches.  This was part of the attraction to me.  I hate “afterwork.”  If I’d had to sew 300 squares together, forget it.  All I have to do here is to weave in the ends.

A single square takes 30 minutes to make.  When I started it as an airport project last May, it looked like this:

Then it grew.  Not an airport project anymore.  It’s just too big.

I have two baggies filled with tiny balls of yarn for this blanket – one filled with solid-colored yarns, one with variegated yarns, and since the challenge is picking which color goes where, I usually plan out one row at a time.  I have a solid ivory yarn set to go there at the bottom where you can see I left off.  If it doesn’t work, I’ll frog (rippit, rippit, rippit).  That’s only a half hour of work lost.  I’ve done worse.  Knitting really is about the process, y’know?