Mason Dixon KAL

Ann and Kay have inspired a lot of knitting around here with their book. The most ambitious are the log cabin blankets. My son and I are each knitting one. I'll have him post about his once it is further along (it will look nothing like mine). This is mine:
I have 10 colors of Brown Sheep Cotton Fleece. This square started as a test swatch, so the stripes are on the skinny side, only 4 or 5 garter ridges each. I could have restarted, but somehow I just kept on going. My plan is to make twelve 18 inch squares, all different styles of log cabins, each using 4 to 6 of the ten colors to make a 4.5 ft x 6 ft blanket.

One concern I had was making sure I had enough yarn for a good sized blanket. I have seen marked color variation in different dye lots of this yarn. How to decide how many skeins are enough? Well, the square I've started (currently 10x10.5 inches) weighs 2.25 ounces. Very roughly, that translates into 50 square inches of blanket per ounce of yarn. Final blanket with border will be about 4680 square inches so I need 94 ounces of yarn. The yarn comes in 3.5 ounce skeins, so 27 skeins. Holy Moly, did I do the math right? Do blankets really weigh 6 pounds? I suppose they do.

I also measured how much yarn it took to knit one square inch of fabric: 46 inches. According to this independent test, I need about 6000 yards of yarn. Again, the result is about 27 skeins. Well truth is... I've got 24 skeins. That's enough for the size I want sans border. Also, my skeins are all weighing in at more than 3.5 ounces, many closer to 4 ounces. Does this mean they also have more than the stated number of yards? I will either go a little smaller, or I will make the border out of black. I don't expect to have to worry about it for months yet.

Not only is there lots of other summertime knitting to do, this first square is taking me a surprisingly long time. I think it's because of all the picking up and knitting, which I am terribly slow with --- I find I have to use a crochet hook. Bonne Marie accidentally purchased a really cool item that would be great for log cabinning. I have never seen anything like it, a circular needle with a hook on the end.