Comfort Zone

Well, it's all in - all 9000 lbs of it. Wall to wall, floor to ceiling throughout the living room and the kids' bedroom, plus a huge chunk of the common storage area downstairs. I'll post photos later in the week - the unpackers come today, which should also be an adventure, since there's nowhere to set anything. Nevertheless, it is a warm fuzzy to have our stuff at last - the bed with the firm mattress, my beloved stove with the accurately calibrated oven temperature (I burned a lot of stuff last month) - it's starting to feel like home rather than playing house.

In spite of all the disruption, I did have the foresight to take some knitting photos before the Day Of Many Boxes. I've been frantically knitting up a warm cardigan for DD, since the mornings are getting frosty, but not yet frosty enough for a winter jacket - and I've managed to do it from the existing stash.

Some time ago, in an effort to expand my colour sense beyond my favorites (analagous blues and blue-greens, neutrals, blue-and-neutral), I pulled out my copy of ColorWorks by Deb Menz and picked a hexad scheme - essentially six hues evenly spaced around the wheel. I weighted the selection towards the warm side, and ordered some Wool of the Andes from KnitPicks:



I was a little disappointed in some of the colours, which were flatter and less attractive than they had seemed on the monitor, and I found the contrasts so jarring.... it went to the bottom of the heap for some time. However, it was also the only really suitable yarn in the stash for a hardwearing child's cardigan, and to my relief, DD was highly enthusiastic about the colour scheme.

I wanted to tone down the effect as much as possible, so I alternated the highly saturated with the flatter colours:



And put the whole thing on a background of charcoal gray (from my seemingly never-ending stash of Briggs and Little Regal - not the softest stuff, but the KP yarn is fluffy enough to compensate):



I am still ambivalent about it - it's so far out of my comfort zone, but I think I have successfully dodged the potential for garishness. It is knitted in the round, with a steek up the front for the zipper, and the 2 stitch stranded pattern means the carries are just long enough to make an extremely warm fabric, but not so long as to snag with hard wear. It's also very quick to knit.