So these days my life are dominated by stripes of two different varieties, the blanket I am crocheting and the wallpaper I am pulling down.
The blanket, which is in for no-one in particular, is made out of the same material as my First Crochet Blanket, KnitPicks Comfy Sport. I had agonized over what to do with all the leftovers from the blanket, and after considering baby sweaters, I decided to make another blanket, but this time using Attic 24's Ripple Pattern. Carla helped me arrange the colors, and after some swatching I figured I could get five stripes out of each ball. Now that I am going it seems I could have squeeked out a few more, but if I learned anything form my mom and her garden design, is that three is a magical number and that odds are better than evens, so doing one, one, three, one, one three etc. is both visually appealing and adds up to five, as I needed.
The wallpaper, is not nearly as much fun, although removing it is fairly satisfying. As I mentioned back around Labour Day, I moved into my grandparents house. They moved up to the Bellevue Life Lease Condos, and have one of the best views in town, but they haven't been able to sell their house. So I am helping them cover the expenses/utilities and putting in some "sweat equity" to help the house look better for when it goes back on the market in the spring.
The stripe-y wallpaper was put up by my mom in the mid 1970s. She was in university and working for her dad in the summer at the family marina, and she did all sorts of crazy calculations so that the stripes would all line up, which was quite the feat. Growing up, we always called the room the striped bedroom, as opposed to Grannie and Grampa's bedroom which had dotty wallpaper, and still does, it is my next project.
Turns out, thanks to a combination of expensive wallpaper, watersoluable glue and some good advice, getting it off the walls is not as bad as it could have been. I finished pulling it all down last night, the room is still a mess, but the walls are no longer striped. Then comes the issues of patching and painting. I am thinking yellow, because while the stripes were fun, I think a bright sunny bedroom will almost be happier.