What little knitting I happen to be doing

So, grad school eats up an astonishing amount of time if you're doing it correctly. I'm starting to find a rhythm where I can get things done (aka don't work places that aren't my office, or don't go home until the work is finished), so hopefully I can settle back into some of my hobbies again. There was a good 2 week chunk of time where I stopped knitting because it was making me feel guilty and wasteful.

Fortunately, that didn't last too long.

So I started making a cowl... hat... cowl... It's complicated, but it'll make more sense when it's done. The gist of it is I saw a pattern for a fake-brioche stitch cowl-hat-cowl and thought, huh, I could do that but cooler... and then I wandered over to my yarn drawers. I had a plan. I had lots of yarn. I grabbed some of the left-overs from the grey cropped hoody of insanity, as well as this weird self-striping stuff I acquired a little over a year ago. It's called Calipso and it's very misleading. One moment you think it's got simple, predictable color repeats, and the next you realize just how wrong you were.

I'm about 75% through the cowl-hat-cowl and I think it's turning out lovely. I'm using a (couple of) brioche stitch(es) I learned from a sweet article from Vogue, and as a result, I think the front side and the back side are both equally appealing.

Brioche stitch is nifty that way--every row is worked twice, once with the light color and once with the dark color. The result is this double thick fabric with tons of give and a reversible nature. The down side is that it eats yarn like it's going out of style. The whole piece needs about 4 more cm of knitting and then some finishing, and then it will (hopefully) make a bit more sense. For now, I just ogle and pet it.