In a bid to continue improving my knitting skills through 2016 I am joining in with lots of friendly folk I know on-line in making a blanket inspired by the skies of 2016.

The project is being hosted with a linky by Tiddlyompompom at You Little Sew & Sew, The Boy and Me and Aly at BugBirdBee but every person involved is making their own blanket (or scarf, or whatever) their own way.

My plan is to make a blanket square for every week using colours inspired by the sky each day of that week. Some people are knitting a square a day but realistically I don’t think I’d keep that up, but one square a week I think I can do. I did consider knitting a row a day but that would make the project a bit huge for taking out and about if we are away during the year – making squares means I don’t have to lug the entire project about with me all the time.

I’ve got a book of patterns for blanket squares that all make up to the same size (in theory) so I will do different patterns to help myself learn new stitches and skills as I go along. I plan to take photos of the sky each day to help me remember and choose my yarn colours.

There will be at least one colour for each day and if I see a rainbow I will add rainbow yarn to the pattern. If the sky is particularly colourful on a day I might decide to use more than one colour for it. I’m not having any hard and fast rules about how many rows of each colour etc as I’m not going to use the same pattern for each square. The pattern/colours might not even be in order of days across the square, but each individual square will represent the sky for that week.

By the end I will have 52 squares which is a stupid number that doesn’t make into a useful blanket shape at all, so I plan to knit up a few extra squares at the end to even it up and finish it off.

Currently my Sky Blanket yarn stash looks like this – and there may be another  variegated one in the post just for sunsets that I failed to resist in a sale the other day…

Hopefully in a few weeks time I’ll be able to post again with my first completed squares to show you. Between then and now I will doubtless be posting photos on my Twitter and Instagram feeds if you want to follow my progress as I go along.