I still knit

I don't just break (or nearly-break) stuff.

Much of the rest of the weekend (well, the part where I wasn't trying to digest down 20 year old data over at work, or the part where I was digging crusts of citric acid out of a vital bathroom fixture), I worked on the fluffy blanket.

It's not *quite* half-done yet, though I'm not convinced I'll have enough yarn for the full 14 repeats of the cable pattern (We'll see). I may have to pare it down by a repeat or two depending on how things go:



The yarn is actually...pretty nice...it's fluffy and warm and being all-synthetic I won't have to worry *nearly* so much about storing it. (It's Red Heart Hygge in the color Wisteria. I am using the free pattern that comes on the ball-band).

And yeah, there's a lot of Red Heart hate out there, I know...but honestly? The technology for making synthetic yarns has improved vastly in the past 10-15 years. (I suppose you could make the environmental argument, but maybe turning oil into yarn is preferable to turning it into carbon dioxide in a car's engine? And at any rate: I'm gonna be hanging on to this for years once I finish it. And I probably won't wash it *that* often, and most likely will do it by hand when it happens....to protect the fuzziness of the yarn).

(Sometimes I wonder if some of the repulsion some people express at brands like Red Heart is simply class-snobbery - not all of us have fancy yarn stores nearby, and not everyone can afford wool for projects like this. And people like me, who live in old houses in the south....sometimes, natural-fiber blankets get munched by the various critters that are hard to keep out, no matter how hard you try).

***

Already thinking about over-break projects (Spring Break is next week). I'll probably take the stalled-out "Socks for the Deputy Headmistress" and try to finish them, and maybe just a cake of a simple self-patterning yarn for plain socks. And maybe Harvest, with an aim of partly/mostly finishing it. And probably a toy pattern or two but I'm trying to decide if I can somehow lawyerball my "no craft supply* purchases during Lent" to let myself get new yarn for one of them, or if I should take the Toft book of monster patterns and make up the "teenaged monster" (tentative name April, after April Ludgate) because I have a funny speckle-print yarn for her body and hair, and sparkly yarn for her horns....

(*As part of the "no unnecessary buying" thing during Lent, because I do tend to use shopping too much as either an amusement or a way of soothing hurt feelings. And I'm going to, at some point (probably before the end of Lent) tally up what I *might* have spent, and send that amount to either my denomination's Week of Compassion offering, or perhaps a charity that fights hunger....)