Snow in the Desert

I live in Southern California, in a rural area that is between our very own wine country and the resort city of Palm Springs, one of the hottest places in the summer with temperatures reaching over 110 degrees Fahrenheit every year.   One of the things that makes this area geographically unique is that we have these extremes of super hot, dry, heat right alongside regions with high elevations and snow skiing in winter.  My house is in between, not being quite so hot as Palm Springs, and being at high enough elevation to give us snow once or twice each winter.  Today my children were elated to wake up to a couple of inches of freshly laid snow, and it is a day off from school to boot so they could play all morning in it!

The beauty of this snow is that by the end of the day most of it will be gone, and other than picking up a few broken branches from around our property there will be no clean up, like those of you in the really cold northern locales have to deal with every winter!

















All this cold weather got me thinking it was really time to work on a new blanket for my younger son (he's the happy one above getting ready to chuck some snow at me!) We're in the planning stages of redecorating his bedroom, and we've chosen a contemporary color palette of teal blue, grey, orange and lime green, so of course, these are the colors I've chosen to do his blanket in.

I made this sample swatch in a wave and cluster pattern, and while I like the look of it, I'm not crazy about how stiff the finished fabric feels, and the clusters use up quite a bit of yarn.  So, I'm going to skip the clusters and make a wavy chevron instead.  I like the color sequence though!

Before I settled on a striped pattern, I had tried making a couple of squares in the same colored yarns.  This twisted square was a really fun one:

  And then, there was this one below:

I really liked this square, but I thought it would be too feminine for my soon-to-be eleven year old son!  (Happy Birthday tomorrow to him!)  Maybe I'll use it in softer colors for my daughter some day.

So that's what's going on in my brain today with crochet!  Happy hooking to the rest of you!

Vanessa