48 hours

I was heading off to night shift on Monday night, when I suddenly realized I had no knitting to take. My Fargyles were done (well, 95% done) and I didn't want to take any other WIPs (though I don't have too many.) I quickly grabbed a skein of Malabrigo Rios and a little 4.5mm circular.

It was an easy night shift. I had to do hourly checks, and keep an eye on one patient. The nurse in charge said I could play on the internet or have a bit of sleep in between, but I had to stay there in the room all night. So I searched patterns on Ravelry, things that I could make with one skein of Rios.

In the end, I settled on making a little Milo for the unborn niece/nephew (BabyN). I wound up my skein into a ball, wrote out the pattern so I could turn off the computer, and started knitting just after midnight.

This is as far as I got. LOL. I did the garter stitch top of the Milo, and left work just before casting off the edges of the arms. I kept falling asleep in my chair! I'd open my eyes ten minutes later with my needle half-way through a stitch. But I do love how this multicolored yarn looks in garter stitch. When I was knitting, with my back to a half-opened door for light, the colors looked all grey and brown, because it was so dark. It was a nice surprise, in the morning, to find a nice green handful of knitting with bumps of yellow and purple and blue all through it.

I slept on Tuesday morning, and got some more garter stitch done that evening. But when I got to the stockinette section, where my stitch count would be the same each row, it was clear that the colors were going to start pooling.

I rewound my ball into a cake, and started knitting a row or two from each end of the yarn.

On Wednesday morning, I decided to buy myself a knitting day. Once a month, I shout the kids to a big indoor playground called Funbugs. They play, and I knit. I took my new Alice Starmore book, and picked some colorwork patterns with BWM Luxury 10ply in Stone.

By Wednesday night, around midnight, I'd finished knitting a broken-rib cuff with a super-stretchy-for-fat-nappies cast off. I put it inside out over a 1.25kg milo tin, and sprayed it to make it damp.

Hehehe.

I'm happy with the outside, too. Not too girly for a boy, or vice versa, and it broke up any color pooling like lead in a stained glass window.

This is my first Malabrigo project. It's soft and beautiful, and I'll be knitting with it more. I have 3.4 more skeins :)