Wednesday, November 9, 2016

Some Times...

Some times call for comfort knitting...



...pictures of our sweet rescued dog, Dexter, who's been with us 10 years and is probably 15 years old,...


...and pictures of Nocturne, our adopted cat who's been running our household since 2007 and clearly cannot find a comfortable place in our house to rest.


 This is one of those some times. Hold on, kids. It's going to be a rough ride.


Thursday, November 3, 2016

Embarrassment of Riches

A portion of my excitement over Persian Dreams is that I can use up a smidgen of my scrap sock yarn. I have a lot.
That may or may not be all of it. Don't judge me. 

I think epic knitting projects like this one benefit by a Come to Jesus conversation with myself. It went something like this:

This is a blanket knit out of fingering-weight yarn. It's going to take a long time. Pause and make sure you can accept that.

Accepted? Lovely. This is a blanket knit out of fingering-weight yarn in stranded colorwork. Pause and make sure you can accept the additional crazy.

Ready to proceed? Good. The pattern as written uses 14 different colors. Stop and think about the number of ends that is to weave in and the amount of yarn changes that is. Do you want to do this?

...No, I do not. 

Line thus drawn, I went to the stash and pulled out self-striping possibilities. As you all know, I love me some stripes. The stash reflected this.


Then I pondered the stripes. Some had very distinct colors, and some were so subtle as to almost lose the striping altogether.


I put all the strong stripers on the bottom row, the ones that had brown (plus sad Christmas) on the second row on the right, and the ones that I worried were too subtle on the top and second row left. There are 24 pieces to the blanket, so I decided to use the strong stripers and do 3 pieces in each color.


I started to knit.

Persian Dreams (mine ravelled here)
knit in Knitpicks Palette in black and Knitpicks Felici in Gummy Bear

After I knit a piece, I realized I wouldn't have enough scrap in any color to do 3 pieces. I got another opinion about the colors, decided to try to incorporate some of the subtle stripers, and plunged ahead. I should be able to figure out pretty quickly if I like the mix of subtle and not-subtle pieces.

And if I don't? I have options.

I feel a little embarrassed about how much Felici I own, but just a little. 
Certainly not enough to actually get rid of any 
or not buy more when it comes back with new colors.
Know thyself.