I've given this spiel before, but yes, yes I do generally cast on over two needles (at least for the long tail cast on).⁠ Now, I see a few of you out there warming up your fingers right now to send me impassioned lectures about how this is bad and wrong and will bring about the downfall of society as we know it. Please don't.⁠ I'm not doing it this way to make my cast on stretchier or looser. The type of cast on you pick mostly determines how stretchy it is. The amount of space between your cast on [...]

I'm thinking about what I want to do next. The answer of late is 'something soft...something soft and fluffy and bright, and don't you dare try and make me feel bad about it.' ⁠So i figured I'd do a floof census and see what my choices are. ⁠ ⁠ Somehow the colors I grab in floof are So Much More Saturated than the other things in my stash (if you wander back to mid January, you'll see a picture of the whole stash laid out, it's mostly the color of rocks, wet rocks, or lichen covered rocks).  Luckily brightly colored [...]

So, there's this thing that sometimes happens where the easily distracted part of my brain says 'hey, what would happen if we tweaked this one little bit?' And the ever so much more practical part of my brain has to come along and say 'nope, make a decision and stick to it.'  And usually the practical big wins.  But occasionally the distractable part makes a convincing enough case that it's worth indulging, just a little. And the whole time I was knitting this, the distractable part of my brain kept hopping up and down and saying more colors More Colors [...]

And done. Because what I needed was another hat.  I mean no, I have an absurd number of hats, about three of which I actually wear 90% of the time. What I need is more people on whom I can inflict my misguided hat making tendencies. As always, pattern will be out fairly soon (it's off with testers now, and some time fairly soon here I'll wander around my yard and find somewhere to take photos). Next up, perhaps I'll go with something other than gray and pink (meaning it will probably be gray and blue...or gray and green...or grey [...]

Perhaps, in an ideal world, I would not knit two speckled gray hats with pink accents in quick succession. But as we clearly do not actually live in an ideal world, we shall have to do our best to shoulder this hardship and carry on. I'd feel worse about this choice if the hats were anything less than charming.  But as they are rather delightful, I think we'll all be ok!

I've found my pandemic knitting sweet spot.  I need projects that are very, very mellow, but with just a tiny bit of something going on so they don't get boring.  For me, that seems to mean miles of stockinette with just a hint of something fancy for a few stitches.  If that sounds like your jam, Midst could be just the ticket.  It's out on ravelry right now and it's 10% off with the code MIDDLE. This really is high impact, low effort knitting.  Which I'm a fan of under the best of circumstances.  But right now, it feels even [...]

See, now it looks way more like there was a coherent plan all along, and not like I dropped a marker and it bled all over my knitting. Or at least I think so.  I suppose it's possible everyone else hates it and I'm the only one smitten. Though really, at this point, I'm mostly concerned with whether I like it. If I knit something and someone else hates it, I'm ok with that.  I'm mostly just here to amuse myself!

This should work out just fine. I mean at this stage, it looks rather like someone took a marker to perfectly serviceable knitting. But give it a few more rounds and things will start to look a bit more intentional. See? There's totally a plan in there somewhere...

So the new yarn from earlier means new swatches.  I have a plan, and I need to do some fiddling about with yarn to see if it will work. I mean some version of it will work.  Some version of it always works.  Eventually.  It's just a matter of finding the right version and the right yarns. None of these are quite it.  That first cable is a little too fiddly.  And the first two yarn pairings are good in theory, but not quite right for this idea. This next cable is much closer, but the floofy yarn is far [...]