Kitsch
Happy Thanksgiving to those celebrating tomorrow!
I actually started this project several times back in late August-September. I made so many mistakes I finally frogged it and put it aside. An opportunity to try again finally came when I was in a lull between projects.
I hope I’m not causing any bad ’70s flashbacks with this color combination! I used these two colors partly because I was fairly sure the recipient would like them, and because their official names are Paprika and Thyme, quite appropriate for kitchen use.
It’s a fun pattern, simple but interesting at the same time. It’s also a bit challenging because the Gingham stitch pattern uses an odd-numbered row repeat before changing colors. I’ve done this before with other projects, but for some reason, I had a serious block with this project. I kept frogging or tinking back needlessly, or making too many errors. Things went much more smoothly after taking a break.
I made one modification to the second Grid section (the two-color section before the cast-off edge). I added in two contrast-color transition rows after the Gingham section (to prevent slipping stitches of both colors in the first row of the Grid section). I knit one row with the green, and then on the WS, *K1, S1 wyib*, and ended with K2. With these two extra rows, the borders seemed more balanced.
I couldn’t get the double-knit and crocheted handle given in the pattern to turn out properly. After ripping out several attempts, I tried a few new approaches until I finally settled on the reversible, uni-color version you see in the photos. I decreased the needle size to US 2.5 (3 mm) for a firm fabric. I liked how it looks, so I’m including the instructions here for future reference
Q*bert
One good thing from the ’80s decade: Q*bert. If you played video console games or home video games (Atari, Colecovision, etc), you most likely played this game. I absolutely loved Q*bert, and it always pops into my mind whenever I see tumbling blocks, slanted squares, or cube-type patterns. It was also a colorful, maybe even psychedlic, game; you had to jump on each cube to change its color, completing the level when all cubes changed. As the levels got harder, sometimes you had to do it twice. If you made a wrong jump (eg: off the pyramid) Q*bert plonked to his death. There were also bad guys like a sproingy snake coil to avoid.
I took a break from my two sock projects on Friday and Saturday to knit a huge (to me anyway) washcloth with this cotton chenille. Because I chose a slanted square pattern, working on it constantly made me recall the funny-looking, adorable Q*bert creature. I used most of the cotton chenille hank and a US 6 needle to make a 10.5-inch square washcloth. I intended to machine wash and dry purposely to shrink the washcloth. (After all, the label says to handwash then dry flat.) None of the pictures I took turned out well, but the washcloth turned out great after a wash and tumble dry. It’s softer and fluffier. It hardly shrunk, though, but I’m happy with it.
While the Q*bert reminiscing was good, I had a not-so-good ’80s Fashion Nightmare Flashback at MOA while mall walking. In the Gap front window, there was an eerily familiar sight. There were thick-striped polo shirts accented with gray (eg: red gray red gray, or blue gray blue gray…). I managed to swallow my gasp of horror and not trip. I couldn’t believe it. You see, way back in the late ’80s, maybe 1 or 2 years before the Gap became what it is today (eg: it wasn’t yet cool), they had the exact same patterning on a bunch of mix-and-match shirts and shorts. The colors and styles appeared to be a strong match to the old versions. I couldn’t find an example at the Gap website, though. I remember back then, my friend bought one with red stripes, and mine was turquoise. (I hadn’t learned my colors yet, either, yuck! I don’t believe I wore any good outfits in the ’80s until I discovered Esprit and Generra. I freed myself from brand name dependency in the ’90s, thank goodness!)
