#maybe separate bags per row? threading them on a long thread?

[cecilyacat]

Soooo do any of you remember when I mentioned here aaaages ago that I was making a knitted blanket out of little puzzle pieces? No? Anyway, I need 496 pieces and today, after 7 1/2 years I finally finished knitting all the pieces!!!

This is what it looks like all arranged nicely on my floor. (The white pieces of paper on top of the stacks have the number of puzzle pieces for that colour on them but it doesn't show up well on camera...) On the left are the stacks of long and short edge pieces and the four corners.

This took you 7,5 years??? you might say. Well, yeah. But mostly because I did this in between other projects. I knitted a whole bunch of sweaters and socks and other things in the meantime and when I was finished with one of those I started knitting puzzle pieces again. Sometimes just a couple but lately larger batches of 20-40 in a row. So bit by bit my stack of finished pieces grew!

Each piece took me about 30 minutes to knit (please don't do the maths on this one thanks) and by about piece 50 I could knit them by heart. The pattern is quite easy, there's just a couple of techniques you might need to learn (cable cast-on and wrap-and-turn short rows), otherwise it's all just stockinette stitch and increases/decreases. A very nice mindless project for watching tv with the added benefit that quite quickly, you finished something!

All of these are sock yarns. Many of them I had left over from knitting socks or other items but especially in the last few years I purposefully bought yarns I liked and colours that I thought were missing to make it as colourful as possible. I quite like the array of colours I got in the end! Looking at the other project pages on Ravelry I realised quite quickly that I didn't like the look of the blankets with lots of variegated colours or gradients so apart from using up leftover yarn (and the rainbow yarn at the bottom!!!) I only used solid colour yarns.

The next step now is to lay them all out on my floor and figure out how I want to arrange them. And then... lots and lots and lots of sewing. I'm confident it won't take another 7 1/2 years but please let it be less than three...

You can find my project here on Ravelry and the pattern can be bought also on Ravelry from the designer for 5.95$. It's called "Puzzle Pieces" by Megan Ellinger. You don't even have to make a full blanket, you can just make whichever number of pieces and make a scarf, a placemat, a pillowcase... (or just make one as a keychain!)

Anyway, on to the sewing now.