100 Day Blanket
I’m a bit behind with posting my latest gargantuan knitting project. I call it the 100 Day Blanket because I bought the yarn on the day after the election in an effort to counterbalance my wildly unbalanced thoughts and emotions, and I finished it 100 days after the inauguration. It was a very successful coping mechanism for anxiety.
Given that it has 144 squares in it, and that there were about 10 weeks in between the election and inauguration, that means I knitted nearly one square on average. Actually it took me a couple of weeks to gather the courage to put it all together so I’d say I really did just continuously knit for a while there.
Because, dude, that’s a lot of nervous energy. I should also mention that I knitted numerous pussy hats and other smaller projects during that same period. Serious question, what do non-knitters do to deal with their anxiety?
Without further ado, the 100 Day Blanket:
Please don’t look too carefully at our messy side tables.
Here’s a glamour shot:
And a couple of shots of putting it together:
This took place at our friends’ ‘Happy House’ upstate.
One quarter at a time!
mathbabe 
Beautiful, what a great stress outlet
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To distract from Trump anxiety I play pickleball or tennis (pickleball is greatest sport ever invented 😉 , but to lower anxiety I find a variation of Andrew Weil’s simple “4-7-8 breathing exercise” surprisingly effective.
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Me too!!! On my way this morning. In SoCal.
Cathy the colors are fabulous!! I love it!
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1) What a beautiful blanket!
2) My anti-anxiety activity is trying to formalise mathematical proofs in Coq without axioms. Note that nearly all of mathematics require functional extensionality, proof irrelevance or excluded middle, so my attempts usually fail.
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Gorgeous. The black really pulls it together.
100 days. whew! I knit to relieve stress, too, but not at quite such a volume.
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It’s gorgeous! Amazing color work. I, too, have knitted (and sewn) obsessively since last fall. I’ve finished no fewer than six sweaters (four of them were toddler sized) and a shawl. It’s the only way I can handle watching the news.
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Just trying to figure out how long it will take before you can cover the White House!
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Wonderful…I knitted so much pre March for Science that I was unable to mouse with my right hand. I now stress.
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It’s a tough line to walk, to be sure. I’ve been known to pop some advil just to continue knitting.
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lovely.. my wife just took up knitting for much the same reasons.. her enabler is plotting a trip to a yarn festival in Lancashire, who knew there was such a thing ?
I buy old splitcane fishing rods and old broken down fly fishing reels off ebay, and repair them, slowly and painstakingly and not very well, but it’s all good therapy..
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You asked “Serious question, what do non-knitters do to deal with their anxiety?”
I work with wood, and I have enough tools to build a house. My current project is a new backyard fence. I started digging the foundation and post holes in February and finished the concrete (more than 8,000 pounds of concrete and most of it is below ground) work in April. Since late April I’m doing the wood-and-wire part above ground and probably won’t be finished until June sometime. Almost half-way done with the above ground wood and wire portion of the fence. Worked 5.5 hours on the fence today.
Before the fence, I spent several months building a floor to ceiling, wall-to-wall entertainment unit with shelves and closed cabinets that have drawers inside. That was for the family room. I even milled my own molding from cherry and birch. I finished that project in February right before I started digging the foundation for the fence.
Before the cabinets, I pulled up the carpet in the living room, family room, hall and master bedroom and installed tongue-and-groove solid hardwood, but there are two bedrooms left for the flooring project so I’ll be returning to that one when the summer heat arrives making it too hot to work outside.
Once the summer heat breaks, I plan to start working on an outside storage room for the yard tools, etc. that are taking up too much room in the garage.
:o)
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Exquisite.
Personally, popcorn usually works but sometimes Doritos are needed.
Maybe I should take up knitting.
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I have many bags of Doritos in my cupboard.
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Doritos never stay in my cupboard
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What a lovely blanket. I don’t get time to knit things like that, too busy knitting for grandchildren. Also just learning to crochet.
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My mother tried to teach me how to knit, but I seem to have issues with fine motor skills and it ends up stressing me out. So I sew, often modifying patterns to fit my lumpy body (required a few pattern fitting classes) and available fabric. I do like creating mobius scarves out of one third of a yard of silk fabric that was on sale (I used to do advanced engineering mathematics, so I just cannot call them “infinity scarves”).
Otherwise I do weed and prune therapy in my garden. This past winter pruning season it was bad enough I think I saw the trees shiver when I came out with my pruning saw. I have an adult disabled son who needs Medicaid, and with recent news I am looking at a four inch diameter branch of my apricot tree that needs to be removed.
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