Before I posted my congratulations to Hilary for qualifying for the Boston marathon, I was telling you about our non-turkey Thanksgiving weekend, and I promised to come back and show you a Finished Object and tell you about another new restaurant we enjoyed.
So here’s the FO, a throw I’ve been knitting at/for our Vancouver apartment for about two years now — I am sooo glad that it’s done and I can choose another project to leave there — socks, perhaps, or anything that doesn’t require however many tens of thousands of stocking stitches! I had a pattern to get me started but then ended up just striping colours in whatever widths and repetitions pleased me. That was the fun part. The horrid parts were the ridged rows such as you can see in the photo below — they were made by knitting into both front and back of every stitch on the knit row and then knitting 2 together for every purl-row stitch. Since we’re talking about 200 stitches per row, well, you get it! I bought several 100-gram balls of a Galway Irish Worsted Knitting Wool to form the garter stitch edging and tie together the various other stash wools of rust, moss, skyblue, and a variegated blue-mauve. Our apartment has green walls (Benjamin Moore dill pickle), a rust chair, some rust-burgundy tribal rugs, with some accents throughout of the turqouise-sky blue, and I’m pleased with the way the throw plays with the colours — I love the sophisticated taupes and beiges and chocolates in other people’s homes, but I seem to need colour for myself. 
We only had the down quilt on our bed, no other blankets in the apartment, so I’m going to really appreciate this when I can’t sleep at night and want to sit up reading on the couch. Here’s one more photo to give you an idea of how light the fabric is. Excepting the worsted wool, the throw is mostly mohair so that it’s lightweight and warm.
Unfortunately, I haven’t blocked this FO yet and I’m not sure when I’ll get ’round to that — not really well set up there, having no extra mattress for spreading something this size out, nor do I have blocking pins there yet, not to mention that I’m not sure how keen Paul will be about the smell of wet wool in such a small space!
So there’s one promise kept, one FO finished, and now, really, I’d better get going if I’m going to finish marking these papers and get to class. New restaurant info coming soon.
Your throw is BEAUTIFUL!!!
That is beautiful! The randomness of the colors and the occasional ridging really make it.
That would make a fabulous cardigan. The colors are just lovely.
Does Paul stay at this place during the week, and you stay by yourself at the island? If he’s alone in the apartment, I imagine this would be a nice reminder of you and home.
And that would be a tough arrangement, but we all do these things for the sake of work. Sigh.
you know, Dana, there’s probably enough left to make a cardigan . . .
And yes, Paul and I work and live in different cities, having started that pattern about 27 years into our marriage! Not ideal, but challenging and rewarding work for each partner is tough to find in one place. For me to work in Vanc’r would mean working as a sessional (no chance I’m going to put in the work required to have a shot at tenure there, especially in my field) whereas in my small Island city I have a great full-time, regularized position.
Besides the throw as a link to our island home, we’ve painted the apartment in exactly the same colours — a friend calls it our branch office!