A black-bordered blanket in stripes of red, orange, yellow, green, blue, purple and darker red; with variously sized black patches all over it; spread out on a bed.
After I made a suprise blanket for my eldest nephew for his thirteenth birthday, I started to think that this could be something I do for each of the niblings at the same age. Growing up, we had a couple of key milestone birthdays when we were given certain things: a bike; a bedside clock radio. I just liked the idea.
There were two who were next in line (twins) and for various reasons I decided it would be best to consult rather than surprise this time. Mr almost-13 said he wasn't keen on a hand-knit and would rather have a weighted blanket/quilt instead. Easily done and has turned out to be very well loved. (I'm not ruling out making him one at a later date, but it was a relief not to have to make two adult-sized blankets by the same deadline.)
His sister was keen, however, and jumped eagerly into a design conversation. We discussed various options and settled on this mashup concept: "cow print" on a rainbow background. She does really love that cow hide look! I did basically know what she meant and we made some drawings. But I couldn't really visualise it or be sure it would work. I just had to knit and hope for the best.
A white West Highland Terrier dog with floppy ears helps me photograph the blanket.
See below, how some of the patches are raised and some are flat? That's because I didn't put enough black patches in at first.
I knit it first with several intarsia patches. It wasn't too hard to just come up with random, organic shapes without a chart. But I should have done more drawing and planning before I started. I wasn't keen on the yarn-juggling that would be involved if I made more than one or two black splotches at a time. This meant I didn't do a lot of them overall. When I got toward the end and was able to look at it spread out, it was clear that the overall effect was not reading as "cow print" (even though, I guess, an actual cow could well have had only a few black patches) and was more like a rainbow ocean with a few scattered islands.
A close up picture of blue and purple knitting fabric with some flat and some raised black patches.
On the wrong side, you can see the difference between the intarsia; a few small stranded patches I also threw in while doing the main knitting; and the later sewn-on patches.
The other problem was that fabric knitted mostly or all in stocking stitch ('stockingette') will always very much want to curl at the edges. I knew this well of course, and had included as I knit the blanket a decent garter stitch border all the way around, but I also wasn't really convinced this would be sufficient, and it became obvious almost straight away that it was still going to curl. In the end I had to knit on an additional border in black, and then this really was enough to make it sit properly. It wasn't really planned but now I like how the double border looks.
Two images showing a garter stitch knitted border matching the colours of the blanket, and another garter stitch border beside it in black.
After making a few blankets in recent years that *mostly* came out pretty quickly and *mostly* to deadlines, I had to admit this time that I hadn't started the project early enough to allow for all these extra tweaks and problem solving. Annoyingly it became the neverending project that always needed "just another week". In the end it was about six weeks late! Longer, really. than I would have thought it should take to make all together. I did make her a cushion (a repeat of this one) to give to her on her actual birthday. And she was perfectly patient waiting for the blanket.
I think she was really happy with it in the end. I was too, which was a relief since I hadn't felt totally confident along the way about the design coming together.
A black-bordered blanket in stripes of red, orange, yellow, green, blue, purple and darker red; with variously sized black patches all over it; spread out on a bed. 
