Soothing Garter Stitch

Work is very stressful and dealing with contractors for the new-to-us condo is stressful but in a positive way. I feel like I can't deal with anything more complicated than garter stitch and it's Malabrigo to the rescue!

I have a feeling that the majority of the next few months of posts will be about knitting and the new condo, aspects of my life that are about moving forward, that are fun and exciting for me. There are so many other things that are stressing me out that I don't want to spend the time blogging about unhappy things when that time and effort could be spend doing things that make me happy.

So, here's a pic of the Sean Scully Malabrigo afghan (scroll down) to date. Instead of black and white, I'm using orange and yellow, specifically, Tigerlily and Pollen, with some KnitPicks Merino Bare. And I'm adding an off-set strip of purple and grey, specifically Purple Mystery and Pearl, to the bottom. And the rest will be big green and little blue vertical stripes. Perhaps I should sketch it out, but instead, here's picture showing roughly where the elements will be:

Close-ups of the the pieces that are done or mostly done:

Basically, I'm holding 2 strands together and knitting on size 10.5 US needles. Malabrigo is kettle-dyed and so some skeins will be more solid, and others show more variation in color intensity. You can really see that in the purple above. I ran out of the darker, more solid purple, so went to Knitch to find something comparable. (Knitch doesn't sell Malabrigo worsted, but does sell the silk/merino DK weight. The Needle Nook does sell Malabrigo worsted, but was out of the purple.) I picked up 2 skeins of Manos del Uruguay in Aster, a purple that matched very well.

Knitch has a huge selection of Noro yarns and as much as I've seen on other blogs about Noro, I've never worked with it. I've heard they're scratchy. Considering that I'm surrounding myself with the ultrasoft Malabrigo, I wasn't interested in working with anything scratchy.

An aside, on Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me last week, Mo Rocha made a crack about handmade sweaters always being itchy and this week, he made an apology because the knitting community contacted them to protest (the words knitting community made the audience laugh. I swear, we get no respect). They also mentioned Ravelry.

However, I found some Noro with high cotton content and walked away with not one, but two skeins of Noro: Taiyo in color 2 (grey, green, and peach) and Furisode in color 1 (grey, orange and lime green):

Clearly, I have cast on for another project -- a center top-down triangular shawl, garter stitch, on size 9 needles. I'm telling you, I can't deal with anything more complicated than that.

The peach from the Taiyo will echo the orange from the Furisode, and the lime green in the Furisode will echo the bright green in the Taiyo. That's serendipity because I sure didn't plan that when I bought the yarn.

In other knitting news, I finished the commissioned baby blanket: Basically it's one strand of blue and one of white Cotton Tots and one strand of navy blue Cotton Classic, using size 11 needles, cast on about 100 stitches and knit stockingnette and reverse stockingnette to make a square with in a square effect. Finish with three strands of Simfonia navy blue yarn held together and single crochet the border with a size N needle until bored. Took me about a month.

I call it the commissioned blanket because it's for a client of Husband's. Today, Husband was at the office working on a case for that client and I was at the condo with the client's husband who we will most likely hire to lay down our bamboo floor. I gave them the baby blanket today for their new grandson.