Blanket Crazy

 

Oh my gosh, you guys had me cracking up yesterday—the comments were both so helpful and so hilarious, and I kept reading them out loud to people and just going to pieces again.  So great.  Thank you.  The solution was simple and elegant—I chained a few stitches across the two gaps.  Three minutes, tops.  And the unfortunate headlight effect is completely gone!  I wore the top with confidence yesterday (though I did compulsively check it in the mirror once or twice an hour all morning, just to make sure it wasn’t stretching with wearing) and nobody laughed, nobody.  Success!  Thank you for your help. 

I’m fully engaged with this blanket right now: 

The stash is a hostage to this project.  (What if I work on something else—that granny square vest I’m always threatening, maybe—and I use up the last of that excellent pale orange and then I can’t get any more???)  I know.  That, as my daughter likes to point out, is a first-world problem.  Anyway, of course the beauty of a blanket like this is that if I do run out of something, it doesn’t matter in the least. 

It is a measure of my fascination with the color-play, combined with endless (oh, I do mean endless) garter stitch that I continue to labor over this blanket while the summer heat bears relentlessly down upon us.  A lap full of wool takes on a new quality at 95 degrees.  I begin to feel one with the wool.  I feel like the sheep must feel.  It occurs to me (again) that this might be a sign of unhealthy obsession—someone said to me yesterday, “Knitting in July?  Isn’t this the off-season?”  and I thought for a minute that maybe it is the off-season, and maybe I should be doing more summer-ish things, like tatting lace (as if I knew how to do that, because if I did, believe me, I would be tatting all over the place) or hemming halter tops or something, but then, in my mind, I reached the conclusion that there is no such thing as an off-season for knitting, and that if I want a blanket to be finished in the fall, when it’s cool, I have to knit it in the summer, when it’s hot, and also that if I weren’t knitting something I might not even recognize myself, which made me pull up short again and take a moment to assess my own level of potential crazy, and then I remembered that the guy who was asking was wearing his pants tucked into his socks and at least two hats at once and is known to talk to himself, so I felt better, until it dawned on me that he probably thought I was crazy.  Sobering.  Anyway. 

So yeah.  I’m knitting a wool blanket in July.  I like it that way.