Knit. . . the never-ending fish blanket

The first few fish, May 2008.

This started out back in May 2008, after I found the "recipe for fish" on ravelry. The tessellated fish vaguely reminded me of an M.C. Escher design and I had recently started knitting socks so I was sure I would have plenty of sock yarn scraps to use up over time. I decided to have "dark" fish swimming one way and "light" fish swimming in the other direction. Thus began my lengthiest knitting project to date! After the first few fish I had the pattern memorised and I soon discovered it was the ideal "travel knitting" project. I packed a small plastic box with a few scraps of sock yarn, a couple of wooden 2.5 mm dpns and an old dental floss container for cutting the yarn. This "Emergency Knitting" box accompanies me almost everywhere, just in case I get a chance to squeeze some knitting into my day e.g. whilst waiting at the Dr's or dentist's or as a passenger during a lengthy car journey. I can even take my "Emergency knitting" on domestic and international plane journeys and do a little in-flight knitting, as my kit meets most airline regulations! The wooden dpns are little more than toothpicks and I don't need scissors to break the yarn thanks to my trusty dental floss container!

This is the blanket at the moment:

To be honest, I am starting to tire of knitting fish and yearn for a different little travel knitting project. But I won't give up till I have finished. I have promised myself that I will get the interminable fish blanket finished in 2012, as part of the "12in2011" group challenge on ravelry.

As of today I have 254 fish, of which 185 are sewn on so far and 69 swimming free. . . 

The blanket is 10 fish wide by 18 fish tall, with the 19th row half completed. 

My aim is for the finished blanket to be 14 fish wide and 24 fish tall, but I may alter that as the end of the year approaches. Current plan is to have a border of rainbow and undyed fish all the way around and Wifie has started helping to knit the rainbow fish for me - for which I am eternally grateful.

I will update you on my shoal of fish later in the year. . . and in the meantime if anyone reading this has any scraps of sockyarn they would like to donate to this blanket, please let me know at yarnificationz (at) gmail (dot) com 

Thanks :-)