fill our mouths with cinnamon

An actual finished object! With pictures! (And with much thanks to my sister Jen, who has let me take her camera back to Cleveland after I dropped mine off a table and it became displeased with me.)

Pattern: modified from Absorba, the Great Bathmat (from Mason-Dixon Knitting)

Yarn: about 3 lbs total of worsted weight cotton, knit with three strands held together: the same 2 strands of neutral (cream and natural) throughout and changing color with each log cabin strip. From Bernat and Elmore-Pisgah.

Needles: size 13 / 9.0 mm circulars

Modifications: increased the row width to 8 garter ridges, knit a bigger (17 garter row) center square, added two strips to each edge to get a longer rectangle.

I'm not sure what it is about the Mason-Dixon patterns that make me want to knit eight of them in a row, but I found this to be a lot of fun. I'm already contemplating rugs for the kitchen in more tame colors arranged in an actual pattern.

And here's a picture of my latest project, which is really a very old project that I knit 8 rows of and decided that I couldn't handle lace. Eighteen months of knitting experience later, magic happens so that "Oh, my God, I would rather be scrubbing the toilet" turns into, "Oh, the flight's almost over? Maybe we'll have to circle for a while? I hope?"

I've officially caught the lace bug, I think.

title from "Sons and Daughters," The Decemberists