tree of life

I've been rather quiet lately because I've been working on secret projects (shhh....), but now that this has been gifted, it's fair to post.
This is a baby blanket and hat with a leaf motif that I knit out of organic cotton. The yarn is marvelous. It's color grown, which means that the cotton itself grows in this soft, sage green. And it's amazingly silky and soft.

Yarn: Blue Sky Alpacas Organic Cotton, "sage," 2 balls
Needles: Size 9 circular and dps, with H crochet hook for the blanket edging
Pattern: my own! very proud.

As you can see in the progress shot, below, the embossed leaf pattern leaves quite a sharp curve at the bottom. But I evened that out by using triple crochets for that section of the border.
There's a whole saga behind this blanket, since I'd initially started a terribly complicated intarsia blanket instead. After many, many hours of working on that blanket, though, I'd decided it looked too amateurish. It was with no small regrets that I bailed and started this leafy blanket.

It all gets back to the value of not being afraid to abandon projects that aren't going well. As one of my professors says, you have to be willing to throw things away rather than getting too invested in something to admit that it's not working out. And in the end, this leafy blanket was such a pleasure to knit, and was received with such praise, that I'm glad I took that plunge.