Guaran-tweed an Awesome Blanket

I've been doing some work lately for my favorite LYS, My Sister Knits. Mostly I've been handling their social media (check out their blog! It's all me!), Facebook, Ravelry and the like. I've volunteered to do a couple of store samples, too ... one was a pair of slippers that I ran out of yarn halfway through the second slipper and was dismayed to learn they weren't carrying the color anymore. So that's sitting in a WiP bag somewhere ... but then. Then.

To help support their Christmas in July with Brooklyn Tweed promotion, they needed store samples. I was looking for something easy and mindless to take with on our honeymoon to Hawaii, and the perfect project came up. The Tweed Baby Blanket.

This blanket is knit with a garter stitch center panel knit on a bias. Then the edges are picked up and the border is knit in-the-round with a feather-and-fan pattern. This is the smaller version (still slightly larger than 3x3), and the larger version has a three-color border. I absolutely love this in the tweed yarn, and the bright red and smokey grey make for a very striking baby blanket.

Personally, I would not normally knit an actual baby gift in this yarn ... it's not machine washable, and that just seems a cruel thing to give to a new mother. However, I get to keep this after a couple months when the shop is finished with it, and I plan to send it to my Nana who is ALWAYS cold (even though she lives in Phoenix). It will be a lovely lap blanket for her, and will make an awesome couch throw after that.

The I-Cord bind-off was fun to learn ... it makes a really nice wide border on something like this, but I learned the hard way that it's a time-consuming bind off. Granted, the blanket had about 540 stitches by the time it was done ... but that meant this bind-off took me about three hours. Definitely worth it in the end, but a late night for sure.