Cartoonish knitting

My friend Naomi sent me a link many months ago to an article about a New Zealand company that sells yarn and needles for what they call “XXL knitting”  (Plump & Co, for anyone who’s interested). I’m a bit of a sucker for novelty, so I’ve been looking at their products ever since, as well as various similar items in Etsy.

Their prices seem pretty reasonable in terms of weight, but of course it takes so much yarn to make anything when you’re working with 25-40 mm needles. And shipping is exorbitant for anything that comes from overseas.

Now that I have an income and more ambition than time, it seemed like a good idea to spring for enough comically oversized yarn to make a queen-sized blanket. So I pulled out a leftover ball of DK to swatch some simple knit-purl stitch patterns (thank you, Barbara Walker) to see how they look together.

The swatch (which is itself overly ambitious)

They look pretty great (some of them, anyway).

Unfortunately, I realised that each stitch will be something like 7 or 8 cm wide (that’s about 3 inches for those who don’t speak metric). So for a blanket that’s, say, 1.5 to 2 m wide, I only need about 20 odd stitches. The swatch (which I worked as if it were a little corner of a blanket) was 53 stitches. Oops.

My current plan is to do a single diamond across, or perhaps a single chevron, and a little seed stitch on either side. Oh well. Maybe someday I’ll design a more intricate blanket in worsted or aran weight yarn.