Thank you to all who saw something redeemable in yesterday's blanket. I think the most telling thing of all is that the entire time I was working on it, my parents smiled sweetly and offered up yarn leftovers and encouragement. At no time did they grimace, giggle, or point. That sort of unconditional support must be something one learns in Secret Parent School, because I find myself smiling sweetly at earnest yet flawed first attempts made by my own kids.

On the knitting front, I'm still blowing the cobwebs out of my brain. This weekend past we narrowly averted a minor flood, and in doing so learned yet another advantage of keeping a large yarn stash stored in plastic boxes. What we see here is several tubs of yarn, dumped out on the projects table in the basement, and an "after" shot of the flood site, with the now empty and drying tubs perched on top of the sump they helped drain.


Had I not had a bunch of tubs lying around the house I would not have been able to stem my mini-tide.

In the course of the whole thing, I ran across two and a half balls of Noro's Kureopatora Plus. This is a multicolor wool/cotton blend yarn that's about six years old. The label calls it out at 23 st = 4 inches, but it knits up more like a heavy DK or even a worsted. It's long since discontinued which is unfortunate.

Although it won't full like the Noro multis popular right now, Kureopatra's cotton content makes it softer than they are. The colors are distributed not through dying but through spinning. It's double ply in construction. It looks like the spinner did a thick/thin thing on each ply, starting with one color and introducing fiber of the second in the thinner sections. Change is gradual (with occasional slubs) from color to color. Then two strands were plied, with the thin strand of one matching up with the thicker section of the other, so that the contrast color of the thinner strand is very evident against the puffy part of the other strand.

I started my latest bit of gratification by working up another of my Kombu scarves. Hey - it worked with a multicolor before, right? But I didn't like the look. The rainbow of this yarn is too strident for the textured Kombu:


So I ripped it out (hard going with this loosely plied fuzzy stuff); and began again. This time with my own off the top of my head variant on the single repeat entrelac rooted multidirectional idea. Mine is done in ribbing on 30 stitches. Provided I have enough yarn, I intend on finishing it with some sort of edging knit on after the main body is done:



I like this much better. Thank goodness my color sense has matured since 14.