The first blanked for the Phoenix youth shelter is done and donated! This is Stephanie from Phoenix holding it on a Saturday morning.
A huge Thank You to all who made it possible, it turned out to be a true community project. Thank you to the unknown knitters in the Valley who made the squares, to the Gaspereau Valley Fibres yarn store who let me have them, to a knitter who delivered them to Halifax, to LK Yarns who kept them for me, and to the members of the local knitting group Knitco who helped stitching the squares together. Thank you to Gena Holley, a journalism student, who came up with the idea for a news story (I might post a link to her project later), and a CTV Atlantic who actually did cover it on the local news. Funny thing, I didn’t see it, but that’s not really important. What is important is that people took interest and hopefully it will result in more blankets.
This is Gena and Hugo, NSCC students, setting up their equipment.
The CTV Atlantic crew filming Knitco members working on their projects.
These are lovely ladies from Knitco, who volunteered to help with the project during the group’s monthly meeting.
Done! The blanket has 24 quilt-like large blocks and 216 small squares.
It was put together using a blanket stitch, a whipping stitch, a single crochet stitch, and a garter mattress stitch. The border is a single crochet all around.
I had some blocks done earlier and they provided the overall idea for the blanket. To make any sense of this colourful mess, I had to arrange little squares like puzzle pieces shuffling them around until they formed larger squares (blocks), which in turn formed “stripes” of cold and warm colours.
Some squares were larger, some smaller so the “stripes” had to be wet blocked first to fit together. It took an embarrassing number of hours to stitch up all those little pieces. That’s why I am asking for 12 x 12 inches squares for the next blanket, if you wish to join this project.
I can think of many metaphors about different colours, imperfections, and collective efforts to finish on some profound note. Instead I will tell you this. It’s a hand-made blanket with more than 165 000 stitches, and each of them was made to keep someone warm.
Oh WOW… Who would have thought that this would be such a enormous undertaking?! It looks really cool though. And by “cool” I mean “warm”