A Blanket on Fire

Well, naturally, since I felt like everything was finally starting to go smoothly with my Noro Log Cabin blanket, that was when everything went wrong.
 
The first thing to go wrong actually happened a month or so ago, when I bought the rest of the yarn I needed. The store didn’t have exactly the color I wanted, so I figured that another color would do just fine. After all, Noro shades tend to go well with each other.
 
Well, they do go together, but not in the way I liked. The new colors were just a bit too neon and pastel for my taste, and I spent an awful lot of time looking at it and wondering whether I should rip it back.
 
It’s not usually my style to rip back, so instead I forged ahead and fretted about the colors. You can buy Noro online, I know, but I don’t have easy access to the mail these days. 

​Well, the problem of whether or not to rip back was solved for me. As I jumped up to go look at a stunning sunset, I put down my knitting in my chair. But when I came back to it, it was piled on top of the citronella candle I had been burning.
 
What could have been a disaster was really only localized to a small piece of knitting. One of the many excellent properties of wool is that it is self-extinguishing, so the hole you see here was the only major damage.

The way I had joined the squares, I had to rip back to solve the color problem – only I was almost out of all my other main colors. I found some Spincycle yarn at Sheep’s Clothing in Kennewick, Washington that was remarkably close to my main color, and alternated rows with Noro to get a close enough effect in the replacement square.

I figure that I got set back by about a week, and the nights have been getting cooler as we wend our way north. You’d think the answer would be to knit faster, but happily one of the stops along the way was the Pendleton Woolen Mill, where I bought two lovely wool blankets. More on that to come soon.