Tres Chic Veronique: Bloom, take 2

Bloom, take 2

I have good news, and I have bad news.

I'm going to give you the bad news first, ok?
I'd been working merrily along on Blumengruss (which, by the way, is such a harsh name that I'm going to rename it Bloom. Ah, much better).
Bloom is made of 3 parts:
1. You start with a triangle, knit from the bottom up. So the rows get longer and longer and lonnnnnnnger. I decided I'll keep the stitches live at the top.
2. Then, you pick up stitches along the 2 sides and you knit a V shape. (Yay for Vs!) Again, I will leave the stitches live at the end.
3. Finally, you knit a border all the way around, and pick up one live stitch every other row.
Here's a schematic, a la Grumperina:
Here's how far I got after about 3 days:
Cute, right? Well, what you might not be able to tell from this picture is that the yarn is an eye-searing, traffic-cone orange. In order to squelch this overly bright color, I decided to purchase new (neutral colored) yarn for the stripes. Don't look at me like that, buying new yarn is allowed if it's to complete a project! I immediately found this lovely Habu lace weight merino at my LYS:
The colors are called Brick and Whiskey.
So there, I was, chugging along, and then, one person said, in the kindest tone possible, "hm, those colors are very... 70s?". See for yourself.
And that's when it hit me. Those colors are hideous together. Want to see a close up?
I then spent the weekend asking anyone I knew whether these colors were not atrocious together. One friend said to me "I love you, but yes, those colors do not go together". Well then.

On to the good news!
I'm using the yarn I dyed with Marie last week!
And finally, I'm keeping my fingers crossed that Gleek will have a first-day-of-Spring baby!