October | 2021 | jingersnaps

I have lusted over the Knit Picks Hue Shift Afghan kit for years.

Years.

I mean, can you blame me? Can you be a much stronger person than me and resist the allure, the temptation, of all those perfect miter-striped blocks?

All that riotous color vibrating in intensity? So much that the very act of knitting certain squares gives you a headache?

All those diagonal lines fitting themselves in just right?

All of the endless ends to weave in?

Hell yeah, bring it on.

When Knit Picks dropped the price of the kit randomly last year while I was in a particularly vulnerable space of pandemic-based sadness, I knew that I finally had to jump in and make this blanket my reality. It’s knit entirely out of their sport-weight acrylic, Brava, so the idea was that it would actually be a usable blanket in my house, not just something that I made and then hid in a box for fear of evil moth-based death.

I started working on it in January, dutifully knitting away on each block through countless hours of TV…

…and live podcasting events (yay for live TAZ!)…

…and out in the garden. Really, in any place that I could. You see, this blanket is not what I would call difficult at all. Just very, very time-consuming.

It’s separated into 4 blocks, each of 25 squares. Most of the blocks have 2 colors, that alternate every 2 rows, with a centered double-decrease in the middle, leading to those gorgeous diagonal lines in the middle of all that stripey garter stitch goodness. The actual knitting itself is very simple. The real trick lies in being very consistent about how you pick up the stitches for your squares, each time being careful to make the center of your block in the exact same space as the last time.

So, if you’re doing the math, that’s 25 squares with 4 ends of yarn each (for the most part, there are a few little bits where you can carry up your colors, but not many), leaving you with 100 ends to weave in per block.

4 blocks? That’s 400 ends.

It definitely starts to pile up. Then, you need to sew the blocks together, making 2 more ends for each of the 4 seams.

So…408.

It’s a lot.

Plus, when you’re sewing up your blocks, you need to make sure that the stripes all line up perfectly, because you really wouldn’t want to ruin the effect.

I understand that most knitters would have just whip-stitched it up and called it a day, but I stayed the course and mattress-stitched that entire thing row-by-row to make sure that it was fucking perfect.

I was so happy after the sewing up that I grabbed it and wrapped myself up in it and danced around the living room…like one does.

Then comes the border, knit in black, which I had to sometimes use an extra lamp and take my glasses off for, like the proper 39-year-old little old lady that I am.

Seriously, it disappears like Vanta Black against all that color.

So, 2 more ends per border, leaving us with a final total of 416 ends woven in.

Was it all worth it?

Oh god yes.

Just LOOK. AT. IT.

I have never been so proud.

Even the back is pretty!

All joking aside, this really was a gloriously fun thing to make, despite the enormity of it and all of the work involved. I adored nearly every minute of it.

My Knit Picks interchangeable needles might have a bone to pick with me about it though, as this is what doing the exact same stitch all night long for months on DK-weight acrylic can do to laminated birch wood, apparently. I choose to think that it is a representation of my undying love for this damn blanket.

And I am not the only one who likes it.

I do have a bit of a bone to pick with Knit Picks, though.

(And how perfect could a project be if there wasn’t one thing to complain about?) I ran out of 3 different colors before I was finished, but had a boatload left over of other colors. Also, the yarn weight on these particular colors was much heavier than the others, but still labeled as sport-weight despite bordering on light worsted. I’m pretty sure that the heavier weight made it so the skeins themselves (the yardage of which is based on weight) just didn’t have enough yardage, so I had to scrounge on Ravelry for extra skeins in the same dye lot, which isn’t always achievable and really threw off my whole perfection vibe with this one.

A quick glance through Ravelry made it clear that I wasn’t the only knitter with this problem, and it was very variable which skeins ran out, leading me to think that this is more of a quality control issue than anything. I know that my gauge was spot-on, so the frustration was definitely there.