Many little fishes

Well, I started the tessellating fish blanket many months ago, and it still isn't finished. Ack! My goal was to have it done by now. I originally saw the pattern floating the blogosphere last year, and I really liked the concept of knitting a blanket of little tessellating fish. The concept tickled my nerdy little heart, reminding me of a childhood love of M. C. Escher paintings and Square One TV. Then the pattern disappeared off the web for a while, and I was afraid that my fish knitting schemes were foiled. When a friend rediscovered a slightly altered version, I immediately snatched it up and started knitting last June.


Fish were my primary knitting all summer. They came with me to Israel in July, although I didn't get much knitting done while I was studying at Tel Aviv University, but in August and September I was a fish knitting machine. After I rounded the corner of 200 fishes in October, I figured I had enough to make the blanket, and the project stalled. Of course there were several reasons for my fish lull: 1) school started in full force, with all its stresses and demands on my time; 2) finishing (such as blocking, sewing edges, or hiding ends) is my least favorite part of knitting; and 3) I craved other projects. Thus, November was all about knitting scarves—not sewing fishes.


Last week I took my giant bag o' finished fishes over to visit Erin, and I arranged them on her floor to see what pattern would be best for sewing them up. Then, a bevy of new stumbling blocks appeared, and the fish didn't want play together nicely. Instead, the orange fishes, which I originally knit up in order to "brighten" the blanket, jarringly refused to mix with the other colors. Then, the fact that I didn't have the exact same number of all the fishes became an issue. If I want to have an even and consistent pattern, I will have to leave out several fishes and/or knit MORE fishes.

The present fishy breakdown goes something like this:

17 dark red
22 red
22 pink
21 light grey
19 dark grey
22 blue
19 dark blue
21 dark green
21 green
22 light green
(I might use one orange fish.)

Total = 207

But I still don't know how many fishies it will take!