Scrap blanket, reclaimed
This was originally posted on Patreon on March 1st, 2021.
About ten years ago my then-partner and I found ourselves unemployed (by choice- we were going WWOOFing!) and without a place to live (when we did not wind up WWOOFing) for a number of months . We landed with family in mid-Michigan where we spent a hot summer separated from the majority of our belongings (and community), taking leisurely walks to Meijer, watching a nest full of hummingbird babies learn to fly, and knitting a massive wool blanket from scraps.
Said blanket has followed me from home to home over the years. I loved the blanket, appreciated its warmth, marveled that I had knit a thing SO LARGE, but also low-key thought it was kind of heinous. Total randomness often has the ability to mesh with anything but on rare occasions it can clash with, well, EVERYTHING- and this blanket is the proof.
Towards the middle of February this year our pantry and then kitchen sprung a leak. Unable to function in our home in the myriad of ways that I cycle through to sustain my mental health I grasped around for a project to occupy me bodily. From the corner of the void, I mean our couch, the old blanket whispered mustily waaaash meeeee and before I was done imagining the sopping, stinking, weight of the blanket once wet I had snipped through the stitches of the cast off and was unwinding the binding.
The blanket took me two days to dismantle. As I unraveled I met old friends- the thick and thin yarn I dyed with aphids from the bushes in front of the first house I rented in 2009, 1960's Icelandic wool from my Oma, hand-spun resembling dryer lint from the Ann Arbor Art Fair, reclaimed steely grey alpaca yarn from the first thrifted sweater I unraveled, so. much. shepherds. wool (thank you Kathy P. you were on my mind so much!). Golden retriever hair floated out of the loosened stitches and ten years of dusty memories exhaled right up my nose. I sussed out that my issue with the colors lay with the secondaries so I sorted out all of the purple and green and organized piles of blue, red, yellow and dark neutrals. I wound each pile up into a huge ball, knotting the strands together to make them continuous. Then I skeined them on the swift, washed them in the tub, and put them in our damp and torn up kitchen to dry.
In a week or so a 40" 10.5US circular needle will land at our door and I'll start knitting a new blanket. It will occupy my hands while the water damage in our kitchen is repaired and by the time I am settling things into their new places in the pantry I will be well on my way to the next decade's blanket, made from the same yarn as the last decade's.
Before the unraveling!