The Kool-Aid dyed motheaten boucle blanket, and a hat

Once upon a time, someone gave me some dreadfully beige yarn. It was 100% wool boucle, and I'm not really that fond of knitting with boucle, though I like the squishy thickness of it.

(By the way, how do I make an acute accent on Blogger, so "boucle" looks right?)

It wasn't a special gift or anything; she was just cleaning out unused stash from long ago, and hey, I'm the girl you go to in that situation. I could have just shoved it to the back of the closet, but it was a challenge, if you know what I mean.

It was just so dull, I had to dunk it in several flavours of Kool-Aid. So I needed to take it out of the balls and into looser skeins... but in many of the balls, the yarn came off in meter-long strips, or shorter, chewed through here and there by some teeny vermin. Much of it got tossed out -- what else could I do, make a gajillion pompoms or something?

So, here we have it. Multi-Kool-Aid-coloured, no-pattern strips. It will all come together and become a baby blanket, I imagine. I have picked up stitches along the side of one piece, and I'll knit on that for a bit, then pick some up on the other piece and eventually join them in the middle with a 3-needle bind-off. A quick crochet around the edge, and we're done. (Remind me of this cavalier wave of the hand in a few months when we find this in the same state.)


That is charity project #1. I didn't take it with me when I went out Friday. I needed some mindless, portable, no-worry, non-boucle knitting, so ended up taking a ball of Lopi and my trusty 6mm short circular needle.

This yarn actually came in the same load as the boucle, I think. I knit this in a coffee shop, and walking down the street, and in a waiting room, and finally I finished it off at home.

Don't you love the design feature of the top few rows in a different colour? It has nothing to do with insufficient pink, I tell you.

I'm not sure of the point of holes in a warm wool hat. I was sort of thinking of Odessa, and this other hat, but I was winging it, so this is what we end up with.

Both of these are just idle, time-filling knitting. My real knitting these days is the big brown thing. I am finished ball 6 out of 7, and so will soon start having to be careful to knit on both pieces evenly -- it will be grafted down the middle!



And then it will be a great big rectangle.