The invasion of zombies has been vanquished with the aid of sunflowers, peashooters and puff-’shrooms.  I swear I thought Wordtwist was a time suck, this is so much worse.  An hour gets lost in a flash. I’ve mastered all the levels I can in the online and trial versions and have pinky-sworn that I’m not buying the paid version.

Now I remember why I deleted all the games that came with my computer.

Although….I understand the paid version has butter throwing corn. And grumpy squash…..hmmm.

No, I’m not buying it.

I mean it. Really.

First FO of 2010

Ta da! A FO for 2010 already, this might be a record for me since it was cast on and finished in the same month! Knit, blocked and worn. It’s devilishly difficult to photograph, but it’s cheerful and bright.

It’s also pretty amazing because I hated this yarn in the ball. It felt like stringy hard cotton with no stretch. I bought two skeins of it on a whim because I saw it knit up in an attractive narrow scarf. Got it home, tried the scarf, found it boring and put the yarn away for two (three?) years. When I was stash diving recently I decided to give it another go and after many false starts, figured out what I wanted to do with it.

Yarn: Noro Sakura (discontinued) two skeins, 147 yards/40 gram skein. 36% Rayon, 28% Polyester, 18% Nylon, and 11% Silk. I’ve misplaced the ball band, so I’ll add the color family when I find it.

Needles: US 7 Addis

Size: 5 inches wide and 80 inches long

Started: 1/14/2010
Finished: 1/31/2010

Pattern: What pattern. I cast on a bunch of stitches (somewhere between 200 and 300) and did garter stitch the long way. This took advantage of the long color changes in the yarn to produce very subtle stripes. I knit up all of one skein, ending on a purple stripe. On the second skein, I wound off the first half until I got to the purple part again and started knitting out. This gave me a roughly balanced looking scarf with blue-green on both outer edges and purple in the middle.

I could have stopped there, the scarf was long enough to wear but that left me with half a skein of yarn. I decided to wind the leftovers into two balls evenly divided by weight. Then I picked up stitches along each short end and knit down in garter. This added another 8 inches to the length on each end so I can wear this multiple ways; wrapped multiple times, or with the ends through the middle.

Three of the four colors on the ends don’t repeat in the long part of the scarf. And the first skein has a stripe of brown in it that’s not in the second skein. So even though the yarn was from the same dye lot and the same color family, the colors in the two skeins did not completely repeat.

After washing and blocking, the scarf became soft and relaxed and a pleasure to wear. It’s funky and colorful and just the thing for gray winter days. I’ve been using it all week. For someone who doesn’t like to knit scarves, this tickles me no end.

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Between guarding against zombies and harassing the birds, Cleo is exhausted beyond words. Actually she’s faking it, hiding behind that paw. One eye is barely cracked, keeping an alert out for any treats that might fall on the floor.

Tags: Cleo, Noro scarf, Sakura, zombies