Sunday, October 20, 2013

Things I Knit While Furloughed

From October 1 - 16, the US Government was shut down due to lack of funding; I was one of the hundreds of thousands of people who were effectively laid off during this time.  With no known date for work resumption and no paycheck in the meantime, I applied for unemployment, looked for temporary jobs (guess what? they don't exist!), and did a boatload of commissioned knitting to ease the stress.

My green monster baby blanket grew by leaps and bounds, from 50% to 76.3% complete:
at 50%, off the needles for maximum purtiness
no room! nooo rooooom on the needles!

These legwarmers were so nice, I wanted to keep 'em... but I didn't:
Hanging Out on a Limb [Rav] by JM Cobb; knit with 2 skeins of Spud & Chloƫ Sweater in colorway Skydiver
action shot modeled by the happy recipient
MODS: 97 rows between CO and BO to achieve 16” length; used a climbing eyelet stitch pattern in place of every other knit rib

I'm also in the process of baby sweater-ing for a pair of twins and their older brother!  Two 3-6 month sweaters down (minus the buttons, of course), three more sweaters in various sizes to go...

There was non-commission knitting as well!  I started an Olive Branch [Rav]... then thought better of the yarn/pattern combo...
Nope.
...and ultimately cast on a simple eyelet triangle shawl from the world's softest yarn:
Much better!

And there was a gigantic chill pill... because I totally needed one:
Chill Pill [Rav] by KnittingPony; knit with less than 15 yards each of Universal Pace (discontinued) in 19 Yellow and Cascade Heritage Silk in 5619 Christmas Red
MODS: used a provisional cast-on of 34 stitches and knit the decrease instructions twice, once for each color

And now I'm back to work, with a mountain of email to dig through with relief.  Let's hope this doesn't happen again in a couple of months, when the stopgap "debt deal" expires.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I got lots of knitting done while furloughed, too. And reading. Now I'm mentally preparing myself for Round 2 in January.