Colour change yarn and a bit of knitting

I was tipped off recently that Pound Stretchers sometimes carry some interesting yarn so I decided to head along and check it out.  The tip off was correct and I came away with a few balls of this lovely Magic Aran colour change yarn.  You can just see on the left of the photo the picture on the band around the yarn which shows the effect when it's knitted up, sort of like stripes with a row of little purple flowers going across one of the stripes. 

 

 

I loved the colours and although crocheting didn't give the same effect as shown on the packaging I did quite like the look so I decided to make a baby blanket in double crochet; here's the swatch I did to begin with, you can see how the colours are forming fairly nice even stripes.

 

So I made a good long chain and started on my baby blanket, to begin with I loved how it was looking, each colour seemed to take up almost a row and it looked pretty good...

 

Unfortunately as I got further on the pattern started to pool oddly, all the lilac smudges which on the packaging made up the rows of little flowers were cramped up at one end of the blanket while the other end had all the blue, green and yellow yarn; not quite the effect I was hoping for.

 

I'm still not quite sure what to do with the blanket, I could carry on and see if it's better once it's the right size (you can see the pattern does seemed to have jumped over to the other side), maybe once it's larger the pattern won't look quite so wonky.  Or I could rip it out and start over; possibly doing smaller squares and then crocheting them together.

 

My indecision led me to the conclusion that this sort of yarn would be much better for knitting.  My gran taught me to knit when I was very young but I never mastered casting on, casting off or indeed the purl stitch, I could literally just do the knit stitch.  How hard could it be?  I can crochet relatively well after quite a short space of time so I figured knitting couldn't be much harder.

 

Not so...

 

Although I managed the cast on fine and I can sometimes do both knit and purl stitches now I seem to have a serious issue with creating extra stitches and also the ability to add in holes and weird loops.

 

While it's not disastrous for a first go there is definitely A LOT of room for improvement.  I'm finding it all rather frustrating though, especially since I could chuck the knitting needles to one side and go back to being relatively confident at crochet at any time.

 

I'm determined to give it another go and I've found some good You Tube videos which I think might help me work out where those extra stitches are coming from so expect another knitty update at some point in the future, hopefully the next attempt will be slightly better than this one!