In the fall, I needed a knitting project that wouldn’t take much thinking. I was tired of making socks and interested in using up as much yarn as I could, so I decided to knit a striped blanket with yarn leftover from other projects.

I gathered a bunch of different yarns together based on color. I used both acrylic and wool yarns in a variety of weights. To make up for the difference, I doubled the really thin yarns. This helped, but I still wound up with a wonky, wavy blanket.

So that the blanket would look the same on both sides, I used garter stitch and paid attention to the color changes*. I wanted a scrappy look with lots of color, so I used a mix of solid and multi-colored yarns. For some of the doubled strands, I used two different colors.

When I had used up most of the yarn I’d collected, I had a nice lap blanket. It was wider than it was long, resulting in stripes that run from top to bottom instead of side to side.

Even after weaving in all the tails, the edges were uneven and messy looking, so I decided to add a small border. Because of the border, the blanket now has a front and a back, but I am still happy with it over all.

*Details for the interested:
I cast on 200 stitches using a 4.5 mm circular needle and then knit in garter stitch. To get the dotted lines from the color changes on both sides of the blanket, I switched colors after an odd number of rows. For the border, I picked up one stitch for every two rows.