Rome, if you want to...

We had a great holiday. And then I went back to work. Needless to say, I still haven't recovered from last week, so I haven't finished uploading all of my holiday photos onto my laptop, let alone sorted them out and uploading them onto Flickr. So here is a half assed limited selection: The Trevi Fountain. Legend is that if you face away from the fountain and throw a coin into it over your shouler, you will return to Rome some day. In actual fact, there are so many people crowded around it that you'd probably take out someone's eye. The closest I got to a yarn shop in Rome - this was a Diesel display window on the Via Corso. The Gambler went inside to check - no yarn for sale inside. It's good to cover all of the bases. What really struck me the most was the fact that this is both a modern and an ancient city. This little enclave was at the edge of an archeological dig just down the road from the Coliseum. Are the tiles 40 years old or 400? I have no idea. The Coliseum. What remains of it, that is. Turns out that recycling has been all the rage here for some time. All the marble was harvested years ago - some of it used by the Christians for their churches, some burned to yield lime for cement. More to come. I promise. Really. On the knitting front, I decided that post holiday ennui was best addressed by casting on for a new project (Although I was technically on call the day after we came back, the weekend was super quiet, so I spent some quality time with the cats). I visited Acorn Street Yarns in Seattle just after the Sea Socks cruise. They had a bin full of mini skeins of Jaggerspun Zephyr Wool-Silk laceweight yarn. Brenda Dayne had been wearing a Modern Quilt Wrap on the cruise, so I sat down on the floor and selected about 14 different colours that I thought worked well together. Turns out that the pattern only calls for 9 different colours - so I narrowed it down to these ones to use for The Zephyr Quilt Wrap: I tried to organize the colours that I selected from darkest to lightest, and to do the same with the colours that the pattern calls for, and then replace them in that order. In retrospect, I don't know if it makes that much difference - I think that she distributes the colours pretty evenly throughout the schematic. It was very fiddly to start - between the laceweight yarn slipping off of the relatively large needles, and trying to weave in the ends as I changed colours, and the squares being very distorted initially. It didn't help that the first 4 squares were the small ones. But now I definitely have the hang of it. It's one of those "just one more square" type projects that is hard to put down.