A Bluestocking Knits

I had a craving to knit something from the stuff I bought at GB Woollen in Kowloon Bay last July, the "Maurice" wool from a Japanese company called Puppy — I’m assuming that this link is the same company, but well, I just don’t know for sure.  This wool is in rich jewel-tones, thick and soft with the color shadings coming at fairly random moments, so that unlike, say, Silk Garden‘s blocks or stripes of color, these make subtle dashes.  Very pretty.  Like Silk Garden, too, it occasionally surprises with a burst of something new — I got through I think three balls before the turquoise joined in!

I’ve just spent a lot of time, I confess, reading Babelfish Japanese-to-English translations from the Puppy page, things like, "The disappointment hue which it sees from the computer screen follows in the monitor and with actual hue it is accurate and there is a water service which will not agree."  (I can follow some of this, but the "water service" part has me stumped.)

I am in fact making Elizabeth Zimmermann’s Ribwarmer from Knitting Workshop.  The weather is cooler, and my thoughts turn to sweaters and scarves.  This piece looks reassuringly just like the diagram in the book — here one side front is on the left, one side back on the right, with the open rectangle being the armhole (I decided to graft the shoulder seams instead of sewing them, so cast on provisionally).  I haven’t done many of EZ’s patterns.  She seems to be the country mouse to Rowan’s city mouse, but then I’ve always been torn between the two.

Here is a close-up — you can see in some places how the colors blend sometimes two at a time, teal with rose, olive with teal, as they shift.

("Ribwarmer"!  It’s, what, all of 60F/15C outside.  I’m such a lightweight.)