Pollyanna Rainbow Sunshine and the Needles of Doom

Lyda here. Friday’s post was pretty heavy-duty serious, not to mention way too long. No politics today, I promise.*

Check this out – DrawMo 2007. You draw one drawing each day of November. Fun! You can do it with the group online, or on your own. C’mon, we can do it together!

Even – especially! - if you don’t think of yourself as an artist, you can just lock up your Inner Critic for a few minutes and put something on the page each day. Doodles, cartoons, or freeform squiggles are fine. You do not have to show your drawings to anyone, ever. No one will grade you. There will not be a pop quiz.**

A pad of art paper can be worth the price, and you can often find it on sale. But cheap paper has the advantage of being, well, cheap. Disposable. You can rip it up and start over, you can play, you don’t feel pressured to Create Great Art.

Meanwhile, back at the stash…

I worked a lot on the scarf for second son “Chuck Norris” this weekend. I’m loving knitting with this huge soft yarn (Lion Brand Wool-Ease Thick & Quick yarn  - as mentioned in this post). Very easy, very soft, fast results.

I’m knitting the scarf lengthwise, so I cast on 30 stitches and then put down the needles and measured. I’m getting about 25 stitches to a foot, and I want the scarf to be at least 6 feet long, so I cast on 150 stitches. That was a lot of yarn on my size 13 (with 36″ cord) circulars. It was too bunchy on the needles and I didn’t like working like that. So I tinked some and ended up with 100 stitches on the needles. My plan is to make the scarf in two equal sections which I will then join. In theory this will make the scarf 8 feet long. “Chuck Norris” is tall and getting taller, and now lives where they get that white cold stuff in piles on the ground. I think ya’ll call that ’snow’. Yes, I am trying to make him a walking blanket he can wear around his neck. Yes, this may have something to do with being an overprotective second mom.

So far, I’ve knit a whole skein of black, and tonight I will start with the Claret colorway (which is a purplish red). We’ll see how the scarf looks with fairly thick vertical stripes of each color, since that’s how I started. No matter how it looks, it will certainly be warm!

It’s going to be hard to go back to the Twisted Sister scarf and the evil twisty ribbon yarn after this.

* See? No politics. Yarn! Art! Fun!

** See? Not even a pop quiz!