Barely tenured

Oh no...

... I've started my very own knit blog.

Don't worry. Safely segregated from this one. If you don't care, just don't click.

Rainbow blankie II: Design improvisation, scale woes, currency arbitrage.

What colors should the Hoover blanket be? I wanted a cream border, which settled over half the problem. My first idea was to have several runs of narrow stripes in each of five jewel tones, separated by wide cream bars.

I wanted to start working, but the Weatherwood knitting store didn't have many colors to choose from: greens, blues, purples, and lots of cream. The proprietor kindly let me study a Rowan color card. I selected colors to order later online and bought a few there. Since the store was in Weatherwood, the only circular needles carried were Addi Turbos.

Two huge questions: total yarn consumption? total time consumption?

Rainbow blankie I: What I learned from the test swatches

Once upon a time, a nice social worker taught me to knit using a couple of pencils. I spent much of junior high school starting little projects in rainbow ombre yarn. During a long, lonely, semester abroad, I even knitted a giant brioche rib alpaca sweater, way too warm to ever wear.

Now everyone knits. And I'm having a baby. Shouldn't I knit again too? I feel like I'm hiding something when people talk about knitting: I still know more about certain kinds of patterned stitches than most people who knit, even though I can't work in ends and have them stick. (A confession: I even made a sloppy little garter stitch scarf back last winter, during my IVF cycle and all that accompanied it. Still haven't worked in the ends, though.)

So, when I was in Weatherwood in June, bored out of my skull and looking forward to a month in a dormitory in British Columbia, I remembered the Hoover blanket pattern I'd somehow run across in Knitty, and I went to the brand new yarn store downtown.