Eighteen hours until the Olympics begin and still no idea what yarn I’m using. I’ll tackle that after I share with you three beautiful things from my past week:

1. Homemade (by me!) chocolate chip ice cream on a night when it was still nearly 95 degrees at 11 p.m.

2. Susan invites me to have dinner with her and Holden. She then allows me the honor of reading the bedtime story. Being the adults, she and I get to stay up and chat after it’s lights-out for Holden.

3. Riding home from Rosslyn after my volleyball game, I cross the Key Bridge just as the sun is tumbling down behind the trees upstream. The spires of Georgetown before me catch the last evening rays, and the Potomac River below is calm beneath the oars of the scullers heading back to the boathouse.

How about you? What’s been beautiful in your world this week?

As you know, the Olympics begin on Friday, which means that I have slightly less than 48 hours to figure out my knitting project to work on during the Games.

As with every Olympics since 2006, knitters, crocheters, weavers, and spinners around the world will begin a new project or pick up a long-lingering one with the intention of completing it before the torch is extinguished at the end of the closing ceremony.

The first time this massive knit-along was conducted it was known as the Knitting Olympics — a brainchild of the Yarn Harlot. In 2008 and 2010, the field of play expanded to include crochet and moved to Ravelry, where we dubbed it the Ravelympics. This year, due to a cease-and-desist order from the U.S. Olympic Committee (accompanied by a poorly thought out letter that ended up eliciting a slew of bad press before an apology was issued for the wording), the knit-along once again has changed names. We have henceforth dubbed it the Ravellenic Games.

I already have the project I’m going to work on picked out. I’m going to knit a Color Affection shawl.

What hasn’t been decided is what colors to make it with. I’d like to use up some of the yarn I already have on hand, as it calls for three skeins of sock weight yarn, and, frankly, I have a lot of sock weight yarn. My solid/semi-solid choices are decidedly more restricted than would be my variegated options, but I think I like the way a one-color yarn works more than a multi-colored one in this instance. And I’m not above a trip to the yarn store to supplement the stash, but I’d like to rule out what’s at home first.

Normally I’d go for three bright colors — probably blue, green, and purple — but the completed shawls on Ravelry [apologies if you can’t access that link] suggest that picking at least one neutral/dark might make for a more striking accessory. Unsurprisingly, neutrals are few and far between in my stash (and life), so if I go that route, I’ll likely need to hit the store.

So, if it were you making/buying this shawl, what colors would you pick? Leave a note in the comments to help a girl out.