I finished another Mathematical Knitting Project!
This is another Coded Blessing Blanket.
This time, though, it’s for my 22-year-old son.
I’d finished knitting for babies in the family. (Though now it’s time to knit again.) So I asked my son if there were anything he’d like me to knit for him. He said, “Blue Blankie could use a stunt double.”
Blue Blankie is the blanket I knitted him when I was expecting his birth and I was on bed rest. After he was born, I gave him the blanket every time I fed him. I was happy when he took Blue Blankie with him to college, but yes, sadly, Blue Blankie is falling apart.
However, Tim said he’d like a purple blanket this time. And I’d already used the same pattern to knit a blanket for my niece Alyssa with a blessing coded in the stitches. So I decided to do the same for Tim.
Here’s how it works. The stitches make a sort of plaid pattern with knits and purls. The pattern has a sequence of 12 rows that make one large pattern-row. Each pattern-row has seven smooth panels on the front side of the blanket. And each smooth panel is split into two parts. So I used those panels to code words of seven letters or less.
The code I used was base 5. So A = 01, B = 02, C = 03, D = 04, E = 10, F = 11, and so on. So I only need 5 stitch patterns, using three stitches.
I used some simple patterns. 0 is knit each stitch. This matches the background.
1 is purl each stitch, making a bumpy row.
2 is a cable made by holding 2 stitches to the back.
3 is a cable made by holding 1 stitch to the front. (Making the cable go the opposite direction from 2.)
4 is a yarnover and knit 2 together — making a hole.
Here’s a closer look at how the stitches turned out.
And an even closer look.
The first four rows are my son’s name, Timothy Ronald John Eklund. So the first row, for example, is 40 14 23 30 40 13 100. (To knit Y, I began one stitch ahead of the 7-stitch panel, using 9 stitches for 100.)
I’m not going to tell what the rest of the blanket says, except to say it’s a blessing. Can Tim read the code?
Now, this is exactly the same way I made Alyssa’s Blessing Blanket, but it turned out that hers had an error. I had almost finished Tim’s at Christmas time, but finally proofread it — and found an error, took out about 50 rows, and reknitted them. But now it’s done, and it’s error-free!
And it was a wonderful thing to knit a blanket full of love for my 22-year-old son who had just moved to the other side of the country.
May you thrive, Tim!