One Fish, Two Fish

I'm making a baby blanket to donate to the Binky Patrol. My knitting guru suggested finding a technique that I wanted to learn, since a baby blanket is like a little sampler and makes for good practice. Furthermore, if you don't like the technique, the baby blanket is small and it's over quickly.

I decided to make this cute fish blanket. The technique I wanted to learn was reading knitting charts, since the fish pattern I liked was charted. I tried, but I couldn't read the chart. The writer wrote the chart so that I couldn't understand what the stitches were, and she didn't give stitch names, only descriptions. It also reminded me of cross-stitch, which is too much of an exercise in strict, controlled, dizzy counting than I prefer.

Utterly frustrated, I found a written pattern for fish. The problem with that was that the pattern was only written from head to fin, and I wanted to connect my fish in a long row, instead of sewing all the individual fish together at the end. It took a lot of finding-out skills and trial-and-error skills to determine how to read the pattern from bottom to top, increasing the decreases and decreasing the increases. I also had to make sure the correct increases and decreases were chosen, so that they slanted the correct way and looked similar to the original fish.


The green is the original fish, and the purple is my modified "backwards & upside down" pattern.

-吴碧芙