Knitting a Blanket That Took Three Winters

There is a blanket folded over the back of my reading chair that took me three winters to finish, not because it was complicated, but because I kept setting it down and forgetting where I left off. It started as a gift for my son Marcus when he moved into his first apartment, a simple garter stitch throw in a deep green wool. He moved in during his second year of college and moved out with a full career and a wife before I finally handed it to him. He was gracious about the delay. He is that kind of person.

Why I chose something so plain

I am not a skilled knitter. I know maybe four stitches well, and garter stitch, which is just knitting every row without purling, is the one I trust most. I chose it for this blanket on purpose, because I wanted something I could pick up in ten minute stretches without having to remember where I was in a pattern. That turned out to be both the right choice and the reason it took so long. A project with no complexity has no urgency either. There was never a tricky section I needed to finish before I could set it down, so I set it down constantly.

The first winter I got through maybe a third of it, working mostly in the evenings after the dishes were done, sitting near the radiator with the television off. I liked the sound of the needles more than I liked most shows anyway. By spring I had a rectangle about the size of a car seat cover and I put it in a canvas bag in the closet, telling myself I would pick it back up in the fall.

The year I almost gave up on it

The second winter I barely touched it. My husband Sal had a health scare that fall, nothing that turned out to be serious in the end, but frightening enough at the time that knitting felt like an indulgence I did not have room for. The bag sat in the closet from October to March. When I finally pulled it out again, I had forgotten how many stitches I had cast on, and I spent a frustrating hour counting stitches across the needle to make sure I had not dropped any while it sat untouched. I had dropped two. I did not notice until I had knit another six rows past the mistake, and by then the fix meant unraveling all six rows to get back to the hole and repair it properly.

I almost quit that night. I remember sitting with the whole thing bunched in my lap, the yarn tangled where I had been pulling at it, thinking that Marcus did not need a hand knit blanket, that he would be just as happy with something bought from a store, and that I was wasting evenings on a project that clearly was not meant to get finished. My daughter Nora, who was maybe eight at the time, found me sitting there and asked what was wrong. I told her the blanket had a hole in it. She looked at it for a long moment and said it looked fine to her. Children are generous critics.

Fixing a dropped stitch, for anyone stuck the way I was

If you are working on something in garter stitch and find a dropped stitch a few rows back, you do not always have to unravel everything above it. A crochet hook can often catch the loop and ladder it back up through the rows, working the horizontal strands of yarn one at a time until the stitch is back on the needle where it belongs. I did not know this the first time it happened to me, which is why I unraveled six rows unnecessarily. I learned it from a library book on repairing knitwear, borrowed almost by accident because I was looking for something else on the same shelf.

• Find the dropped stitch and slide a crochet hook through the loop from the front.
• Locate the horizontal strand of yarn directly above it, the one left behind when the stitch dropped.
• Hook that strand and pull it through the loop on your hook, forming a new stitch.
• Repeat up through each row until you reach the top, then slip the last loop back onto your knitting needle.

It takes practice to do smoothly, and the first few times my repaired stitches sat a little tighter than the ones around them, visible if you knew where to look. On the blanket for Marcus, there are two spots like that, small puckers in an otherwise even field of green. I know exactly where they are. He has never mentioned noticing them, and I suspect he genuinely has not.

The third winter, and finally finishing

I picked the project back up seriously that third fall, partly because Marcus had mentioned he was looking at apartments and I wanted to have something ready by the time he moved, even if I was already years behind whatever timeline I had first imagined. I knit through most evenings that winter, through a stretch of ice storms that kept us inside more than usual, through the slow business of binding off a project that had grown heavy enough to warm my lap just sitting there unfinished.

Binding off felt less like finishing a blanket and more like closing a long conversation I had been having with myself in ten minute increments for three years.

When I gave it to him, wrapped in brown paper because I did not have proper gift wrap on hand, he unfolded it slowly and did not say much at first. Then he asked how long it took me. I told him the truth, that it took three winters, and he laughed and said that explained why I always asked him if he still needed a blanket every time I saw him, which apparently I had done more often than I remembered.

What I would tell someone starting their own

Choose something simple enough that you can pick it up without needing to relearn the pattern each time. Expect to set it down for longer than feels reasonable. Keep the yarn in a bag with a tag noting the stitch count, because you will forget, and counting stitches on a needle by hand is a slow and irritating way to spend an evening. And do not worry too much about the small puckers where you fixed a dropped stitch. The people you make these things for are rarely looking as closely as you are.