Happy Knitting

ETA: I've tried to fix the pictures. Could someone please let me know whether they are now visible? Thanks!

I mentioned in my last post that my house had been torn up for 45 days. As it turns out, 45 days is the outside limit of my tolerance for having my house torn up. On day 46, I evidently become a raving lunatic who frightens husbands and small children and causes contractors to back slowly away while laughing nervously.

However, I apparently also become extremely energetic and efficient. My house is entirely put back together, with a new bathroom, new walls, new paint, and new living room furniture. It is beautiful. I am happy. All is well with my world.

My husband deserves (he insists) full credit for talking me off the ledge. He also deserves full credit for moving enormously heavy pieces of furniture all over the house and lighting a fire under contractors who clearly did not understand the importance of getting the damned project done already.

And now I am deeply engrossed in happy knitting. I got this (at my request, and to the accompaniment of much eye-rolling) for Christmas:


This is a full bag of Noro Kochoran, one of my all-time favorite yarns. I really wanted this to make a soft, fluffy sofa throw. I cast on Christmas morning and have been happily and obsessively knitting ever since.


Note the colors. There is nothing about these colors that would appeal to a male--ever--and that is the point.


Every afghan I have made has been confiscated by someone in my family. And while I am thrilled that they love my afghans, I am also cold. I want my own blankie, and this is it. It's like the hot pink flip flops I bought when my black and brown ones kept disappearing. I couldn't keep a pair of flip flops for more than a few weeks. I've had the pink ones for three years. So this is the knitted equivalent of hot pink flip flops.

The pattern is here, and it is free. I used the Kochoran instead of sock yarn scraps, obviously, and size 10 needles. My goal is to knit one ball of yarn per day, giving me a finished 48"x 60" throw in ten days. So far, I am on track. I don't normally set knitting goals, but this is an exception: I want my blankie, darn it!

Knitting For Sanity

The chaos in my house continues unabated. This is day 45 (by my count) of the Great Flood of 2011. (Note: the name is ironic. For the amount of inconvenience it has caused, the bathroom leak really deserves a more dramatic name.)

Once again--as for most of the past month and a half--there are noisy things happening in my house. Today it is a plumber and a drywaller. I had thought the drywalling ordeal was over last week, at least downstairs, after the four days the drywaller spent putting my ceiling and walls back up, texturing everything, and painting the living room and dining room. Then yesterday the plumber came to put in a new bathtub, and that's where things started going sideways. He spent most of the day trying to get the drain to install correctly. When that didn't work, he said he would need to cut a hole in the freshly repaired ceiling to access the drain. So he showed up this morning with the drywaller, cut a hole in the ceiling...and couldn't make the drain work. After a couple more hours, he went out to buy a different drain. In the meantime, the drywaller is twiddling his thumbs, waiting to close up the ceiling. From the sounds in the next room, that is not happening anytime soon.

The drywaller also needs to put up drywall and paint the bathroom, but of course, he can't do that until the tub is in and the new pipes and faucets installed. Again, not happening anytime soon. Since the tile guy is supposed to be here Monday, the drywaller wants to come back tomorrow (Saturday) to finish the walls. There goes my weekend.

Worse yet, I haven't been able to get a tree or decorate for Christmas, or, heck, see the damned floor, and I'm getting really, really antsy about it. Every time I think we're making progress, another monkey wrench gets tossed into the mix. I detest chaos and clutter under any conditions, and being trapped in a house full of it for an extended period is making me more than a little crazy. I am so not cut out for remodeling.

So I've been playing with yarn. A lot. I wove a shawl out of Noro Silk Garden Sock, finished Snowbird, and cast on Tinder. But at the moment, I need the sort of comfort that can only come from gorgeous, squishy yarn and enormous amounts of plain knitting. I cast on this:

This is Malabrigo in Stonechat, and I have a lot of it. I bought it in a destash months ago, planning to make a sofa throw. The time has come. This will be a log cabin pattern, only super large scale. Each log is 12 inches wide, and the final throw will be a single giant block. All garter, size 8 needles. It doesn't get any more comforting than that.

Knitting, take me away! (Bonus points if you can name the reference.)