To the beach... or UVA

We've been experiencing unseasonably sunny days and warm temperatures lately.  Normally, April is a month of rain showers with the temperature spiking crazily up and down, but this April has been sunny and the temperature has frequently been hitting the upper 80's.  It's making me crave the beach.  In fact, I'd sell my own children to be at the beach right now.  Luckily for my kiddos, Knit Picks is making it easier for me to at least pretend I'm at the beach.

Knit Picks Stroll Gradient yarn.

Last week, while I was working those crazy hours, a box from Knit Picks showed up on my doorstep and guess what was inside - two skeins of Stroll Gradient.  What does yarn have to do with pretending to be at the beach?  The colorways are Sea You Later and Lifeguard.  Unless they have colorways named Sunburn and Shark (which they don't,) it doesn't get much beachier than that!

I'm knitting a.... well, I'm not even sure what I'm knitting.  The finished piece will be some form of shawl or scarf in a triangular shape. The original plan was to knit a long triangle shape until I'd used up half the yarn then start decreasing.  But I may never do the decreasing.  Instead of making a looong, shallow triangular shawl with the point in the center, I may just make it an even longer triangle with one narrow end and one wide end.  It's a work in progress.

While the design may be a work in progress, knitting with Stroll Gradient is definitely not work!  I've knit with other forms of Knit Pick's Stroll before.  Knit Picks offers practically a full catalog's worth of varieties of Stroll.  There's regular, flat colored sock yarn, there's Tonal, Hand Painted, Glimmer, Tweed and probably a few others I'm forgetting.  But for reasons unknown to me, Stroll Gradient is the softest.  It has the same fiber content as the other yarns so maybe I'm just imagining it being softer.  Maybe it's the beachy themed colors I chose.  Maybe it's that the yarn came in ready-to-knit cakes and I didn't have to pause to wind the skeins.  Whatever the cause, I swear, this yarn is softer than the others and I am having SO much fun knitting with it, even if it looks like I'm knitting a UVA scarf instead of a beach themed masterpiece.



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