Shrinking in the heat

Hello from the middle of a heat wave. My word, it is hot. I know the entire country’s in the middle of the same heat wave (or some variation on a theme) but that doesn’t make it any more comforting when you walk outside at 9pm, when it is dark, and it is still over 90 degrees outside, and muggy to boot. That’s what we experienced Friday night after we went to see the new Pirates of the Carribbean movie, and it’s gotten even hotter since then.

All this nasty heat means that I’m doing my best to stay indoors and avoid going out if at all possible, and I am focusing the knitting on small things, like socks and baby stuff. My coworker’s little girl was born back in May, but what everything else I had to get done, her baby gift didn’t even get started til this past week.

I’m making this set, or rather, as much of that set as I’ll have yarn to finish. Instead of Opal, I’m using some Lorna’s Laces yarn in soft, sherbet hues of pinks, creams and greens. It’s creating kind of a random striping effect with the colors, but I love how it looks. And it has the benefit of being very small and light, which is good for both the heat, and for the fact that tomorrow I fly off to Phoenix for a business meeting, and if I thought the heat was bad here in the Sacramento valley, the weather forecast for the next few days in Phoenix looks even worse. Yuck.

And since my knitting seems to be all about the sock yarn these days, I’ve had my eye on the gorgeous mitered square blanket that Shelly has been working on. I have a respectable stash of leftover sock yarn, although not remotely enough yet to do an entire blanket, and I’ve been trying to come up with a way to use it up, and this looks perfect. I’d have already started on it, except for one teensy little problem.

You see, as un-color-coordinated as I am, I looked at that mitered square blanket idea and immediately thought of those amazingly gorgeous quilts where the quilter takes hundreds and hundreds of tiny squares of fabric and puts them together so that the colors actually sweep across the quilt, moving from darks to lights (here are some examples, although the ones I really love have the color gradiant changing diagonally). And I have always loved the look of those quilts, but since I have neither the patience to do all those millions of tiny little stitches, nor the desire to actually learn (and I will note that I have nothing but deep respect for quilters and I also realize that socks are all about millions of tiny stitches too – it’s just that I prefer knitting needles to sewing needles), I figured the closest I will get to one of those quilts is by viewing them on display at the state fair.

But now I am thinking that maybe I can do this same sort of effect, but with several hundred tiny little squares of sock yarn instead. Which means that before I even start, I would either have to have all the yarn already acquired and laid out in some kind of massive grid so the colors were set up the way I want them (a prospect that makes me dizzy, just thinking of how the heck I could possibly organize them), or else do every single square individually in the hopes that some day I could then sew them all together. Either of those seems a wee bit impossible at the moment, both because I don’t have nearly enough yarn yet to do this kind of thing, and also the thought of seaming all those squares together individually is enough to make me start to twitch (although in my less same moments I ponder whether seaming them with black sock yarn would actually create kind of a stained glass effect and wouldn’t that be amazing). But I am determined to eventually find a way to make this idea work – it’s just going to take time.