new beginnings

Now that Button's quilt is done, it is of course time for a new project. I didn't realize it at the time, but when I started a new quilt earlier this week, it coincided nicely with the beginning of the new semester.

On campus, it is once again possible to tell time without a clock simply by watching the floods of undergrads who pour out onto the sidewalk at regular intervals. At the moment, many of them are still confused, bobbing around with little direction. A labmate referred to them rather unkindly as "a bunch of cows," but to me they're reminiscent not of lemmings, but of the hundreds or thousands of individual pieces for a patchwork project.
They may be lost now, but it's amazing how quickly the gridlocked hoards of gaping teens get their stride and aimless wandering becomes a pattern.
And in no time at all, they'll know where they're going and head there with a vengeance.
It's real-life alchemy, if you ask me.
~Phosphorelated

a spate of finishing

Now that Button's quilt is done and the summer is drawing to a close, Brad asked that I finish his lap blanket. It's a knitted behemoth based on a quilting pattern; it's a modified log cabin pattern called Curve of Pursuit from Woolly Thoughts.

Normally, I'm not really a pattern knitter; I like to take ideas from various places, but seldom knit things exactly as written. The Woolly Thoughts folks are a notable exception to that rule. Their designs are mostly geometrical shapes formed into patterns based on mathematical concepts.

I need to figure out how to get better pictures of this thing, as it is quite large. It's actually two versions of the same pattern (with the colors re-arranged) joined back-to-back with a common border, so it's quite thick, extremely heavy and very warm. I hope it will keep Brad warm this winter. He's a very long guy, but when he tried it out in his chair it seemed to cover his feet and the rest of him pretty well.

Of course, now that I've taken up quilting, I probably could have whipped up a quilt much faster; I've been working on this on-and-off since November of 2007. Still. I had fun, and it will be warm! I'm a knitter at heart, and, like most knitters I know, I am secretly convinced that covering my loved ones with woolly goodness is an absolute necessity. How else will they keep warm?
~Phosphorelated