I’ve been wanting to do a helical stripe project, so I’m going to test it out with a blanket worked in the round. Adding in dark blue since I have half a skein extra of it so I should be able to bind off with it. Starting dark blue and otherwise going in sequence as listed and pictured.

I’ve decided to do a square because I prefer square blankets. I considered doing it in garter stitch so I could increase in sets of 6, but since I want it square I’m going to stick with stockinette and sets of 8. I like it when there’s a central stitch per quadrant, so I may increase to 12 straight off, and that will let me immediately divide it up into 6 sets of stitches to begin the spiral. I have to test out whether I like how it looks, however.

Things to remember, the color progression is in reverse order to when they were added. Which makes sense and I should have anticipated it if I’d thought about it, I just didn’t. Luckily I don’t mind in this case!

It’s actually very easy to keep track of where the increases go, which was a concern when I first started. I decided to join the colors once I increased to 24st which kept me from having to wrangle a lot of ends with not a lot of fabric. But a round is still a round, it’s just worked in several different colors.

Working a simply twisted yarn over increase to preserve the spiral as much as possible. I can’t wait until I can switch to circulars as the strands keep getting hung up on the extra points. Meanwhile, it’s impossible to miss when it’s time to switch to the next color because the last stitch of each color is loose.

Tension is the only concern. It’s easy to pull too tight when switching color, causing the stitch from the previous row to get tiny. I’m deliberately loosening up to avoid that.

Really rather loving this. The only annoyance is having to periodically untwist the yarns to the ball as they start spiraling around each other. But that’s a simple matter of dangling the piece until they unwind. As it gets bigger, that will become less of an issue.

I think I’m going to need to mark the last needle worked with a point protector or something when I put it down so I know what goes next. Either that or I always have to end at the end of the row.

1/13/11 About 255g done so far and I’ve got to admit that stockinette is boring. Plugging away at it between other things.

I’m kind of amused at how well the colors match the Harmony tips.

The plan to finish this and not have any yarn scraps is that I’m going to work each color until it runs out, and when they’re all done, switch to the extra 40g ball of dark blue. If I run out of the first ball of dark blue before the other colors run out, I’ll probably join in the new ball so that stripe maintains its integrity.

Burgundy ran out first. In order to keep the stripes working right, the stripe can’t continue if it can’t complete its entire section for that row. So, although I could have done another 20st of burgundy, I tied up that loose bit and worked over it in russet instead. Hopefully the sections will work out that I don’t end up with any really long tails.

Ran out in this order: burgundy, blue (joined in 40g ball), light aqua (had to join in both ties to have enough to finish the section), gold, russet, light green.

3g left of the dark blue and only 2r of seed stitch just isn’t enough for a non-rolling edge. Sooo, adding in another color. I have a 60g already balled up partial skein of a dark grey/black that will finish the edge.

Since I wanted to use every scrap of yarn, I joined up all the remaining ties off the skeins and added them to the bind-off. And of course I ran out of dark grey on binding off, not quite 3/4 of the way through. So I worked in the scraps of other color and then finished off with extra dark grey pulled from a brand new skein. I just popped it on my swift and worked off it for the duration; I think it was about 4yds.

It’s a really good sized piece. Such a simple blanket, but I really like it. 48in long sides before blocking.

As expected, full pictures of it are rather dizzying. More pictures once it’s blocked.

54in wide once blocked. It weighs about 754g.