Tonight I intend to start knitting Sprout’s Yzma Blanket. Sprout is Sarah’s baby (due in about 2 months) and the Yzma Blanket is the wool snuggling blanket I — who am Yzma to my grandchildren — knit for each of said grandchildren.
This one will bright pink — courtesy of the Staci Stash (which had a treasure trove of bright pink Dale of Norway Baby Ull — my favorite baby yarn!).
I plan to make the blanket with a center rectangle and two borders — one inside the other. And I quite fell in love with a Bavarian stitch pattern that was like little bricks with a twisty column between them. Sadly, the “bricks” were twisted stockinette — which biased so violently even on a small swatch that I had to start playing with other options.
The pattern I liked best had the same offset bricks and twisty columns, but with a sweet little flower-like knot set in the middle of each brick (plain stockinette).
The catch here was to center the 3-stitch knot above a 2-stitch twisty column. I tried a variety of ways to decrease over the 3-stitch knot and then increase over the 2-stitch column, but they looked bad. The increasing flattened out the top of the column and the decreasing made a awkward bump.
Inspiration! Since the whole problem was really just turning an odd number of stitches to an even number and vice versa, why not increase over the 3-stitch knot (a practically invisible Make 1) and decrease over the 2-stitch column (a K2tog that looked like part of the twist). It worked! I love counter-intuitive solutions!
(The top photo shows the original Bavarian pattern, the next is the awkward swatch and the lower photo shows the pretty swatch)