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.)

And Again

While surfing through my Rav queue yesterday, I came upon this--Tinder, by Jared Flood. I immediately had to have yarn this exact color for this project. I had this in the stash:


It is Bartlettyarns fisherman 2-ply in a color that was supposed to be "Rust" but is really salmon pink. Not a bad color, but not the greatest color in the world for me. I decided I could overdye this with orange and brown and get something close to the color I wanted.

I recently bought some dye in "Burnt Orange." It turns out, however, that when I pulled the container off the shelf, I did not read the label. The container was incorrectly shelved, so I had actually bought..."Salmon." Overdyeing salmon with salmon didn't seem all that productive to me.

Not to be deterred, I decided I could come up with my own burnt orange based on the dyes I already had. Not a bad idea, really, since I have red, yellow, and brown. So don't ask me why I decided that red and brown together would turn salmon pink yarn into orange yarn. I have no idea. In my defense, it was late in the day and I was distracted. But rest assured, red and brown do not make orange, no matter how much one may want them to.

Instead, they make this:

It is a truly beautiful deep cranberry--which is, as usual, not what I was trying to achieve, but still lovely, and it will be excellent for Tinder, if that's what I decide to use it for. I had seven skeins of yarn, which is way more than I need, so I left one the original color, with the vague idea that it would make pretty trim for the cranberry.

Maybe facing for the collar? Edging for the cuffs and bottom? Not sure, but I like the colors together, so perhaps I'll work something out.