Stitches 2015 Project

First I have to put up a picture of my daylilies. I hope to have more pictures later, but they are blooming so nicely that I just want to put up a photo!

 

Okay, so now a bit about my current knitting project! Every year for more than 15 years my sister and I have been going to Stitches Midwest. We take classes and shop and have a wonderful time.  We have taken lots of classes over the years, but of course in a three hour class one never finishes a shawl or a sweater. One makes a little sample swatch that exemplifies what one has learned in the class. Over the years I have collected a lot of little swatches! Some are interesting and some are boring little squares, but each swatch represents knowledge struggled with and sometimes gained and experiences made. This means I have not been able to make myself simply throw these little swatches away. Instead I stuck them in a place of honor - a plastic bag in the back of the craft closet where they lay around and multiplied until this year I finally had to clean out the closet. 

So after a bit of thought, I decided to do a kind of quilt out of all the pieces.  There is a sort of fashion show for the students at Stitches every year and I thought it might resonate with other students to see the swatches from classes they had also possibly taken, so my goal is to put everything together in a blanket in the next two weeks to show at the Fashion show.  Progress has been slow. I set out all the patches and swatches, but it is taking a very long time knitting all the pieces together. Here's what I did the first night.

 

I believe it is important to honor our teachers, so I am I'm trying to knit my teachers' names somewhere near their swatches. Unfortunately the knitted alphabet doesn't work very well.  Here is the progress for this evening. The left end is almost done. I still have one more strip along the bottom edge and I will have the first edge complete (except for an edging that will go on at the end.)

 

One of the squares was badly joined and I decided I would have to cut off the poorly joined part, but I'm lazy and I took aclass in steeking, so I think I will try and steek my work into the blanket. I'm not sure if it will work, but we'll see. I wonder if I can steek this (THe cutting has already occured!)