Rainbow Blanket

There are people who knit for the product, and there are people who knit for the process. Then there are people like me. Depending on the day, I fall into one group or the other. But whether it's a process or product day, there is one thing that I am always doing while I knit: relieving stress.

Knitting is how I calm down, how I make time to reflect, and how I keep my fingers busy while I am listening to an episode of This American Life or binge watching TV shows (one more season of Buffy to go!). 

When I am in a stress-relieving product-knitting mode, the sweet nothings are perfect. 

When I am in a stress-relieving process-knitting mode, I need a blanket to work on. 

I discovered this fact my junior year of college. It was a busy, busy year, my craziest yet. I had no time to drag along a pattern book or consult a chart. I also had a ton of medium-sized balls of yarn leftover from previous projects, and my favorite circular needle free. So, I started knitting a shawl with the nearest ball of yarn I had at hand. When it ran out, I grabbed another, and another.

Pretty soon, I had a project that needed to be carried around in its own bag. Even when I was only halfway through, it was a little lap blanket as I worked on it, and raised quite a few eyebrows. But it was exactly what I needed--a no pressure project that I could continue for as long or as short as I wanted--and I could always put it down with no fear of losing my place if I picked it up a day or a month later.

It was fantastic, and I spent the whole school year bouncing between little, more intricate projects and the blanket before I decided it was time to cast off. This is the end result.

I have gotten a lot of use out of it; when I did research last summer, the place I worked was very chilly. I began to bring a sweater everyday, despite the 85-95 degree temperature outside. When the sweater didn't help, I threw my blanket in the bag as well. It did the trick--and it was fun to have all the vestiges from different projects keep me company as I worked.

I don't have a project like that presently, but I can feel a big process-knitting mode coming on; we'll see where it takes me! 

3-D Art

So I'm taking this 3-D Foundations art class, partly because it's a prereq for ceramics classes, partly because it fulfills a GER, and partly because it's as far from mathy as I can get, so it balances out my beginners programming class and my two other math classes.

We're going to have various projects in different mediums, playing with form, dimension, line, volume and so on.

Naturally, I'm trying to turn everything into a knitting project.

The first week of school, we had a one-day project where we had a single sheet of computer paper and we had to make a non-representational sculpture with it.

After folding a fortune teller (remember those?), I fiddled around with cutting and made a little tunnel. But I still had that extra strip of paper that always needs to be cut off when you make fortune tellers. What to do?

I cut the paper into tiny strips and knitted it.

Unfortunately, I hadn't had this planned beforehand, so I had to make do with pencils, but it turned out pretty well. You're going to have to take my word for it, however, as I don't have pictures.

What I do have pictures of is a WIP made entirely out of wire.

Can you tell what it is?

How about a hint:

That, my friends, will soon be a wire replica of the flyer for my spinning wheel.

Needless to say, I'm quite enjoying myself.