I'm glad my colleague and I got the fieldwork done yesterday; it's raining like crazy this morning and we might even get hail.

I've been, as I said, picking away at the various bigger projects I have going right now. Last night I added a few more inches to the left front of the Kenobi jacket.

I'm also working, off and on, on this:



It's the vintage stripe crochet blanket. It's fun to work on - there's no shaping, there's no counting, you can just pick it up and go to work on it. And at the end of every row, you get to pick a new color. I have a big bag full of scrap yarn (and some wool-ease "repurposed" from the socks it would never really have been used to make at this point), so I have a lot of colors to choose from.

I think I now see Kaffe Fassett's point about color: if you're going to use multiple colors, use a LOT of colors, and don't worry too much about matching/clashing. The more colors I add on to the blanket, the less that scarlet-red jumps out, or the more the purples blend.

That said - there is probably going to be a higher proportion of green and brown to the other colors in the finished blanket - just reflecting my own preferences in color and how I buy yarn. (There will probably be a fair amount of blue, as well).

And here's another thing I finished over my vacation:



This is a toy dog knitted from the directions in Tara Jon Manning's "The Gift Knitter." As I said, this book is mostly aimed at knitting for babies and for dogs, but the toy interested me because of its mode of construction. What you do is cast on at the tail, cast on more stitches on either side for the back legs, cast off stitches for the belly, cast on more again for the front legs, cast off for the neck, and do decreases for the muzzle. So bascially what you are doing is knitting the toy flat as a single piece. Then, you sew the legs into tubes, sew the belly seam from the snout to tail, and it's done. I just used some scrap yarn I had - the coat is made from the dark blue Muskoka left over from Olaf. (Actually, the coat is more complex to knit than the dog itself is.

I've named him "Fido" as he looks like a very traditional sort of dog, and so should have a very traditional sort of dog-name.