Cast-on Monday (and hopefully cast-off too)

Spring is in the air and on the ground! Although we had frost on the roof this morning, it is warming rapidly. I was in St. Louis for the spring equinox. When I got home last Thursday, there were hundreds of grape hyacinths blooming in the yard and the flower bed.

While in St. Louis, we visited a LYS located in a suburb. We had promised Lu that she could pick out the yarn for her next sweater. Many thanks to the tolerant staff at Yarn Com while the little one whirled through the shop, looking at and picking up every skein that attracted her attention. She carried this on while talking softly to herself. Finally, she triumphently presented me with this hand-painted merino wool skein in her favorite shades of purple and pink.

I paired it with some lavender Cascade 220 and a soft pink blended wool in Elysion by Cascade, quickly and quietly moving to the register before she added to the stack.

The washed swatch is very soft.

On Friday I searched Ravelry and chose a pattern that fit this yarn quite well.

https://www.ravelry.com/patterns/library/sweet–simple-cardigan

The other item I’m working is a scarf. It has many attributes, including travel knitting, mindless knitting, stashbuster and quick knit.

The brown yarn is a wool-acrylic blend leftover from Christmas sock making. The gray and white yarns are 100% alpaca. I was given the multi-hued natural colored skein from knitting buddy Kathy. The source of the white is forgotten and unknown.

To keep from being too bored I played around with different striping patterns. To achieve the diagonal stripe, you decrease at the end of the right-side rows and increase at the end of the wrong-side rows. I’ll knit until I run out of the shortest yarn. That could happen today.

Do you have a project in process that is inspired by Springtime?