Rethinking the Cozy Memories Blanket

Here’s a picture of me with my Cozy Memories blanket. I started it off with the three colors I used to make my Riley Rose Shawl.

This photo was taken in November 2018. It still looks like that one year later.

I was really excited to start one of these blankets for the same reason that most people are. I have a ton of leftover sock yarn and no clue what to do with them. I loved the blankets with the black border as a way to separate the colors and keep the blanket from looking too messy.

So what happened? I’m pretty crazy about making everything just right. The problem here was that I was not getting the same gauge even though these yarns were exactly the same. I really was annoyed that the squares were not turning out to be the same size and couldn’t imagine what this would be like when I started adding in other yarns that would have been different from the start.

I wanted a scrap blanket that would be effortless and this became a project where I was annoyed that the squares weren’t working out right (I knit and reknit the squares in the pictures multiple times) and would become a project where I needed to calculate the measurements for each yarn (coming from a mathematician, this shouldn’t be a problem and yet it was). I should also mention that something else that bothers me about this blanket is that it only uses 5-10 g of yarn, which really doesn’t help me use up my leftovers.

So. It’s a year later and I still only have those three squares knit on and now I need to decide what to do with it.

In 2019, I’ve been pretty decent at setting goals for each month. Some of them are crafty related, but most are just things I want to get done that month. I’m trying to be good at setting reasonable goals that I can accomplish without feeling too stressed. This month, one of my goals is to just decide what is next for this project. I don’t even need to act on it. All I need to do is decide if I want to continue with the blanket or move on from it. So here are my options.

1. Keep going and accept that the squares might not be perfect. It’s a scrap blanket for a reason.
2. Rip it out and start something new. If I haven’t worked on it for a year, why will I start now?

Realistically, I’m feeling like I’m going to go with number 2 and start fresh. For now, making this decision means I’m one step closer to my November 2019 goal. I am leaning towards a granny stripe blanket, which would be a first crochet project. I like the idea of this because:

• I can use any amount of yarn and not worry about the size of a square.
• I think the colors tend to blend in a little bit better in this project than the mitered squares.
• Crochet is supposedly faster than knitting, which is a perk for a blanket. (I once knit a california king size blanket. Once. Only once.)

I do need to figure out what I will do with all of the black yarn I bought to be a border around the squares. I’m thinking I could do a stripe of leftovers, then a black stripe… and so on or use it all as a border around the entirety of the blanket itself.

Maybe that decision will be a December goal.

Let me know what you think!