The Most Beautiful Bathroom Mat

 It's not every day I stand around taking photos of my bathroom, but these are strange times and I might as well get used to weird stuff... so anyway, I finished my crocheted bathroom mat a couple of days ago, and I am very, very pleased with it:

The main circular part is the Helios Mandala by Tatsiana Kupryianchyk, who is the same designer who designed the Rozeta Blanket I made last winter. It has two options for the border surrounding the central star, and while I am really happy with the petal border I chose, I am really glad it is finished because OMG it was tedious. It's a technique called brioche crochet which was new to me and it allows you to sort of draw lines with post stitches over top of a background:

I had to spend some time thinking about how I was going to turn it into a rectangular mat, but in the back of my mind I knew that I had learned how to do that very thing when I made my Rozeta Blanket last winter. I pulled out the pattern and sat and looked at it for a while, made a few calculations (and several miscalculations) and after a surprisingly quick attempt, I had added the corners and had smoothed out the edges. I then used the same border from the Rozeta Blanket and worked it around the edges. I was very pleased with how it worked with the blue and silver. It reminds me of those flat glass marbles you sometimes get in home decorating shops:

I dithered a long time about what I was going to do for the final border. I would have liked to have used more of the dark blue, but I had very little of it left and I wanted it to have a nice strong border around the edge. I asked myself: If this was a poster, what kind of frame would I put around it? And in the end, I went with the black because it made the most sense to me and because it matches my bathroom tub surround. T'is a very fancy bathroom mat, but I figure that if I'm going to be at home, I might as well absolutely love my surroundings:

I have a non-slip mat underneath it, in case you're wondering. It would be terrible to get out of the tub and to go flying and give yourself a concussion.

Meanwhile, I have been spending some time with my loom working on the next experiment. I'm learning that I really need to learn how to calculate the yardage I need for weaving projects because I'm quite sure I'm going to run out of yarn. I had reasoned that since my last project ended up being shorter than I wanted it to be if I wove something slightly thinner and longer, I could get away with using the same amount of yarn. I think maybe I might be wrong, but if it doesn't work out I'll just see if I can sew the ends together to make a long cowl instead of a long scarf. Lessons, lessons everywhere:

I've also realized that it's been a while since I picked up some knitting needles, so I decided to wind a few skeins of Malabrigo Arroyo that I've been holding onto for a while. I had daydreamed of using them for a Fair Isle project... I even went so far as to download the chart and to invert the colours on the chart so that it wouldn't confuse me as I worked on it. I got as far as row 5 and learned that 1) I actually hate working Fair Isle/stranded knitting and 2) the colours were just not working for what I had envisioned. So I ripped it all back and started a new project which I THINK might be a top down sweater made with some fun doppler effect stripes in the yoke, but even I'm not really sure what I mean by that. I guess we'll see:

I've noticed recently that I've developed this sort of impatience that seems to be trying to jump ahead and go forward, expecting that things should be different and wondering why the heck we aren't there yet. I only realized yesterday that, hang on Adriene: it's only the first week of January. There's a-ways to go and standing there tapping my foot won't make anything go any faster. And so, I'll just keep knitting and crocheting and weaving and spinning and cooking over here... same as I did before, and God willing, same as I will be for a while...

Have a great week.