Color therapy

This weekend I went to see my parents.  It's a 9 hour drive each way.  While it doesn't seem like it should be, riding in a car is exhausting.  Even when the weather is gorgeous and you have your sweetheart driving you all the way.

I was trying to put a positive spin on things by acknowledging that I had 18 hours of knitting time.  I didn't think about my 6am departure as actually taking away from that knitting time...nor really the fact that on our return trip I would lose knitting time at the end of the day.  But it was a good 14 hours of knitting (or knitting related activity) time.

SO, my car knitting...therapy knitting...comfort knitting...whatever you'd like to call it is this blanket from the Berroco Comfort Afghans.  The pattern is called Autumn Haze, and while I'm not using Comfort yarns, I do find the knitting of this blanket to be very comforting indeed. You'll also notice that I'm not using autumn colors, but I've mentioned that before.

This photo shows the blanket 1/3 finished.  That's one full pattern repeat.  I've decided to reassign colors to the "letters" in the pattern to create a more random and overall colorful effect.  I'm now about 1/2 finished (expect to be tonight if I feel like working on it).

The yarns I'm using are a mix of things from my stash--some Malabrigo Worsted (the delicious purple on the end, pink and turquoise solids).  There's a fun alpaca tweed in a lighter turquoise--can't remember the yarn brand or company.  I'm using some Cascade 220 (light purple) and Knit Picks Swish worsted (the variegated purple and pink).  I love the colors in this afghan, I love the knitting of this afghan (even the slip-stitch color work is gorgeous and interesting) and I love the textural interplay between all the different yarns.  The plump Malabrigo next to the springy Knit-Picks and the slick Alpaca.  It's just gorgeous in so many ways.  And total color therapy.  It's very difficult to dwell on sad or depressing things with all that color and lovely yarn in my hands.

On the way out, though, I almost hit a road block though.  I ran out of the ball of turquoise I was using and needed to wind off a hank of yarn...I usually do this with my swift or David, but David was driving, so I had to improvise.  Thankfully I've lost a lot of weight and am more flexible so was able to get the hank of yarn around my legs and wound it off by going under my legs about 100 times.  See I got exercise too.  Need proof?

Lastly, yesterday I took the day off to recuperate.  I knitted on the Purple Blanket and rested and thoroughly enjoyed myself.  At some point I decided that it was time to examine the stash and see what I could get out of it to make Alyssa's afghan. (I'm sure this is the case when having 2 children, but it's more so when having twins...if I commit to making one thing for one, I MUST make something for the other immediately, sometimes simultaneously...)  In the interest of stash reduction, I wanted to make this happen as much as I could from the stash, but in conversation with David we decided that if I HAD to buy some yarn to flesh out a project that it wasn't a bad thing...as long as the net income of yarn was less that the outflow.

SO, I went into the studio, dug through my wool basket, my alpaca basket, my basket with yarns set aside for other projects long-since forgotten...and I even raided the sock yarn baskets.  (I had put a few skeins of worsted in their with the intention of making some thick socks for around the house).  I came up with the yarns below:

I had intended Alyssa's afghan to be much more green, but what happened is the rose colors really came through...and blues and greens...and some gold, oranges and browns.  And they all look perfectly lovely together.

And yes, that's a calico cat in there.  She totally loved all the yarn in the floor and I had to put everything away to keep her from "cleaning" the babies I'd left her.