Colour Therapy

I’m getting better, but it’s a slow process. I’m not taking antibiotics or steroids (other than my regular inhaler) anymore, and I started taking daily longer walks this week. I’m still quite weak, and still cough a bit. I’m also terribly bored… seriously, I’m a person who loves being on my own and spending time at home, but I also like being outdoors, and being active. 3 weeks of very low activity seem to last forever and I’m already planning some awesome hikes and trips once I feel strong enough.

The weather matches my mood perfectly (although today it’s actually quite nice for a change); it’s windy, rainy, and dark. So in order to defeat bad mood, I took out some Noro Kureyon sock yarn from my stash and decided to knit with it, just because working with all these beautiful colours make me feel a little better. I used it in two of my most recent projects.

First was Pistachio Saffron, an oversized, casual jumper/ sweatshirt designed by Carol Feller. I combined Noro Kureyon Sock with some merino and silk from Irish Fairytale Yarns in dark purple, which I had bought a long time ago thinking that it was more brown than purple (that’s the risk of ordering online…). Since purple is one of the few colours that I generally don’t like too much, I had no idea what to do with it. Silk makes it a little shiny, so I knew that knitting something for my nephew was not an option (he’s still going through the stage where anything that looks “too girly” is rejected, so even though he loves purple, he wouldn’t wear it). Adding colourful, cheerful stripes of Noro seemed like a great solution to make this dark, purple colour a little less depressing, and the Pistachio Saffron pattern offered a way to do it.

I had initially started knitting the jumper strictly following the pattern, but then decided that I wanted more colours, and knitted the Noro stripes after every 4 rounds of main colour instead of after every 12 rounds. Other than that, I only made it a little longer than the pattern advised.

And indeed, just watching the colour changes made me feel better, as predicted! There’s something about Noro yarns that makes them really unique; they can combine the wildest colours together and make them look great. The colour changes are neither too long, nor too short – just perfect to enjoy knitting even more. However, I have to say that Kureyon Sock is not going to be one my favourite Noro yarns. It’s normal for this brand that their yarns have variegated thickness, but since Kureyon Sock is overall fingering weight, these changes in thickness go a little too far, alternating between worsted and lace. The lace-like parts are just to fragile and delicate, and I had to constantly remove them from the skein, for fear of them breaking in the finished sweater.

When the jumper was ready, I still had an almost full skein of Noro left, so I removed the purple/pink/navy blue parts, and decided to knit my first pair of real gloves (with fingers!) in the shades of green and blue.

The pattern is designed by Drops, and called “Catch a Rainbow“. It was actually really easy and so much less fiddly than I’d expected! These gloves made me so confident that I immediately started knitting a different pair, which I’ll certainly post here when it’s finished! I think gloves might become my little knitting obsession for a while, because I enjoyed knitting them so much 🙂

That’s all my latest news; not much is going on except knitting, reading and recovering slowly. Oh, and my cats have new cardboard boxes 🙂