you just need color.

As of today, D.C. has been told officially we must stay home. We can still go to the grocery store and out for exercise, but the parks have all been closed and there’s some confusion as to whether or not we can spend time at the garden.

Today it was cool and it started raining just after work wrapped up for the day. Because of course it did.

So, I reached for one of my recently modeled shawls to help cheer me up.

This is my Hairpin Turns shawl, aka Around the Bend by Nim Teasdale.

It’s knit with two skeins of Freia fine hand paints. They’re both in the Ombré Merino line — Vamp and Melon. I like the yarn and am glad I still have two balls for future projects.

I cast it on as my Tour de France Knitalong project in early July 2018 and finished it sometime in early 2019 … I think. It disappears off my blog in November 2018, at which point I still have 200 (decreasing) rows to knit.

It’s not perfect. There was a recommendation in Ravelry notes to purl a row to keep it from curling weirdly where you bind off half your stitches, but I should only have purled the bindoff side, rather than the other side, too, I think. But I think that’s mostly a critical knitter thing, rather than something the casual observer would pick up on. And because of the shape, it wears a little weirdly. This is sort of the best look I’ve found for it.

But it is squishy and I love the colors and it goes with so many things.