Potato chip knitting

For the last couple days, my newest knitting project, a modular knit afghan, has taken over. I call it potato chip knitting because I can't seem to stop with one diamond. Which is a good thing, since I plan to give it to a family member for Christmas.

For a while now, I've had about 8 skeins of one variegated color (pebble) and 6 skeins of another (sand) of vintage dazzleaire which were given to me because family members think I must run a yarn orphanage. It's like the Island of Misfit yarns or something in my attic. This yarn was a prime candidate for stash reduction. Anyway, this is enough yarn for a large afghan, and while I really like working with wool, there is a lot to be said for making an afghan from yarn tough enough to survive a nuclear war. (Cockroaches and Dazzleaire, that's all that will be left). So I tried various ways to work around the variegation, but nothing really clicked. But when I was re-reading my Spin-Off magazine from Spring of 2006, the article on a modular afghan by Carol Huebscher Rhodes gave me an idea about how I could use this yarn. I changed the color pattern, because I only had two colors, not three, so my afghan has four variegated diamonds making up a larger diamond in a alternating pattern.

I really like the way this pattern is working up. The diamonds are making the variegation much more interesting. To me, it looks like a wood grain or I don't know, pebbles and sand. Whatever. Anyway I think if you keep your old fiber magazines , and leave yarn in your stash long enough, you just might get a serendipitous moment which leads to a christmas present and a cleared out box in the attic. That's why I find it very hard to throw out my Spin-off magazines, because you just never know when an idea might pop out at you!