Fireworks Blanket

16 skeins. 16 skeins of yarn.  Does it sound like a lot?  It certainly feels like a lot.  That’s how much yarn went into my new fireworks blanket.  16 skeins of Red Heart Vivid in Neon Mix. It’s a super bulky yarn that comes in only 39yd skeins (compared with your standard 100-200 for less bulky yarns).  No wonder it took so many skeins.

I picked up a few skeins of this yarn back when I was living in Cali.  I thought it was really fun and wanted to make a tube-top out of it.  I tried that, on size 8 needles – ouch my fingers.  It didn’t really work.  I tried some other things with it, used some to make a card hanger for our Christmas cards, and finally decided it would be best put to use as a large, thick blanket for laying on the grass to watch the fireworks.

Because this variegated yarn changes colors quickly, garter stitch looked messy.  I decided to go with a nice stockinet stitch,  giving my blanket a front and a back. 

However, I didn’t want the sides to curl, so I did four stitches of garter stitch on each side.  It gave the blanket a nice-side border.  The top and bottom roll didn’t bother me that much.

I also found out partway through that I was purling wrong!  I was wrapping the yarn around in such away that I was actually purling twisted stitches. You can see that in the picture above.  Once Mommy pointed that out to me, I switched to doing it correctly.  Neat to know for anytime I want to purposely purl twisted stitches.

The nice thing about super bulky yarn is that it knits super fast.  My fireworks blanket took about a month to knit and came out fabulous. Munchkinhead and I enjoyed sitting on to watch the fireworks this Fourth of July.  It sort of glows in the dusk.