Scrabble Style Blanket Update, and Advuce

You may have seen an earlier post from me about a blanket I want to design and make for my mom. All her kids/grandkids name ‘Scrabble’ style. Well. I did a test swatch to see if my first attempt at making a pattern was successful. I am ecstatic with how the test turned out! I need to make a small change to the spacing so I can keep starting letters on the right side. On the other hand, I am wasting sooo much yarn on the wrong side and the ‘floats’ are just not practical for a blanket - and it’s pulling the right side so the letters don’t lay flat. If anyone has any advice on how to remedy that, please share. I’m excited to finish writing out the pattern and cast on for the full project!!! Pictures of front and back:
16477481406226803977229652170541|1200x900

Lovely. This is going to be such a wonderful gift!
I’m not the best to advise on colourwork but I do know the floats can be caught more frequently behind the fabric to make them shorter, neater, less likely to get snagged on fingers etc. (But it doe not reduce how much yarn you use)
You could try a swatch where you catch the float every 3 or 4 stitches rather than floating the whole width of the letter. I believe it is best not to keep catching on the same stitch number too, rather go 1 or 2 stitches before or after for the additional catches. I think this helps with the tension and pulling too and helps make the fabric more even.

Looking great though, wow huge project!

1 Like

The puckering is because the floats are too tight. It helps to carry the yarn then stretch out the stitches on the right hand needle so that the float lengthens and takes up more yarn. On the test swatch, it may be good to exaggerate the length of the float to see how this works. Eventually you want the float to have Goldilocks’ tension so that it’s between too tight (puckering) and too loose (uneven stitch tension).

And here’s a video for one way to catch floats as Creations mentioned.

I’m so glad that you’re getting this idea to work. It’s going to be a lovely heirloom blanket.

2 Likes

Another question as I get started on this. I have never knit by reading a graphed pattern before, I’ve always knit with row-by-row instructions. I made my own graph pattern for this blanket and then over a couple weekends I wrote it out row by row. In he picture of my test, I knit that following my row by row pattern written out from the top, left to right RS, right to left WS. The test is oriented correctly (top border, name reads left to right). I laid awake last night because after casting on I managed to convince myself that I should be starting at the bottom of my chart (blame late night knitting article scrolling where I found an article that said that’s the way to knit a pattern - bottom to top of the graphed chart). This is a long way of asking: is my pattern going to turn out correct knitting from top left to bottom right? If this doesn’t make sense, please let me know and I will try to explain better. I’m just so worried the names won’t line up and read correctly when looking at the finished blanket.

You can work the graph starting at the top left and proceeding left to right on the RS (right side) rows then right to left on the WS (wrong side) rows. You’ll be knitting the letters top down, for example, the top bar of a T followed by the vertical line on subsequent rows.
It’s not the conventional way to work a graph but it’ll work especially if it makes more sense to you and this is the way you worked your test swatch.
Looking forward to seeing this blanket and your very clever idea come together.

2 Likes