Tubular Tropicals

These warshrags are so, like, totally awesome.

It's funny how one project can lead you down the rabbit hole to three more in quick succession. Last week I sorted through a bunch of bins of craft supplies and fabric, which also happened to contain one unfinished ballband warshrag (top left). Part of my goal was to sort all UFOs (unfinished objects) into one bin to be worked on by the end of the summer (notice I didn't say finished by the end of the summer), and, amazingly, I was able to do that (OK, mostly; some knitting stuff is in its own basket).

I have a vague memory of starting the first one. It must have been on a car trip or where I was somewhere stashless, like the doctor's office, because I ran out of black after two and a half repeats and then, inexplicably just continued the pattern using just the ombre yarn for the next three or four repeats. This looks pretty cool, but it's hard to see the slip stitches because they blend in with the bricks too much and the whole point of this pattern is that I don't have to think about it. So once I picked it back up, I decided to go for the all-out freak show and finish with the bright lime green as the background color.

I am kind of weird and obsessive about this pattern, which I have made at least 20 times, probably more--I haven't taken photos of all of them and most have gone to other people as gifts. It's one of the first patterns I made after I started knitting again in 2006 and it still makes me feel so satisfied and smart when I finish.

Hence the fact that, even though I have my log cabin blanket still in progress, and even though I had only one chart left on Ishbel, I dropped everything for three or four days and knitted three more warshrags.

#2, top right, I started right away in the lime green/pink ombre combo that finished number one. When I ran out of pink, I picked up some teal to finish off the last two rows. (Teal is real, remember?)

For #3, I decided to move on to the cool color family, and do lime green with the bright and cheery "Pool" colorway for the blocks. There's one block row of solid teal just to finish off that ball.

And, since I liked #3 so well, I reversed the colors when I started #4. Didn't like that as much, because "Pool," well, pooled in the stockinette background, or mortar, sections. So, I went full out on the train to crazytown and REVERSED the colors midway through the cloth, reverting to "Pool" bricks and green mortar.

I don't know why this project tickled me so much...probably because it was 1) fast, 2) low-pressure, 3) creative, and 4) inexpensive.