Adding a little magic to my knitting...

Life has suddenly become busy here.  It's a welcome change from the past few weeks that have felt sooooo sloooow as DH began his recovery and home-based physical therapy (PT) after knee replacement surgery in late June. 

He's doing really well, and this week he graduated to outpatient PT.  Fortunately, we don't have to drive to Indianapolis for these sessions (which was DH's original plan).  We live in a small town south of Indy that has a decent PT place just 5 minutes from our driveway - traffic is rarely an issue so it's a nice little stress-free drive.  While it is, of course, a pain (literally) for DH, it does provide for some nice little outings during the week.  I drop him off and have an hour and a quarter to myself three times a week, while he gets in a little social time that he craves. :)  Hey, sometimes you gotta take your fun where you can find it.

And the last few weeks we've also begun to make weekly trips again to DH's mom's house and "The Great Sort" continues.  I've brought home some pretty cotton fabrics that I hope to use to finish some cross stitch smalls with.  My MIL was a quilter extraordinare.  And a very fine seamstress.  If I can lay my hands on the photos of her many quilts (and church banners), I'll dedicate some posts here to showing them.

So with all that, my crafting this week has consisted of some easy projects.  Mostly, crocheting on my Leaps and Stripes  Leaping Stripes and Blocks blanket:

It's about half-finished at this point.

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And I've been knitting some fun dishcloths from left-over cotton yarns I combined into "magic balls".   

Pattern (which is great for variegateds) can be found here.

Mostly, I've joined the different yarns with a braided join, but for some reason these joins have a real knack for ending up on the edges of the cloth, and that can make for some wonky edges when knitting with worsted weight cotton.  So I may not bother with the braided join every time.  Rather, I may just wind the balls and leave the ends loose and weave/sew them in later.   At least I'll still enjoy how the colors change in a ball of wound-up mixed colors - which has this "magic" way of speeding along the knitting.  You gotta find the magic where you can too...  ;^)

And I end up with fun, colorful cloths with otherwise throw-away lengths of cotton yarn.

And that's a win!