LollyKnitting Around has come up with Project Spectrum, a celebration of the colors around us, most obviously in knitting and other textiles, but also in crafts, food, and the different facets of our everyday lives. Each month, from March through August, will focus on a different color.
I suspect that this project, like the Knitting Olympics and Grace’s Poppies’ poetry blogging, will become much bigger than their originators ever suspected. Already, my imagination is humming with colors.
I stopped for a moment last night just before dividing for the Baby Jacket sleeves, to admire the way that the knitting curves on the circular needles. It’s like a little magic trick — I’m knitting straight rows, but it turns into a circle, voilà!
I’d started it on straight needles, then decided that the gauge was just a little tight after all, and moved to these lovely rosewood circulars. Are they not beautiful? so light, so smooth, so rich in their browns and golds, so warm like the grain of a fine violin.
Excuse me, I feel a little "Citizen Kane" moment coming on …
"Rosewood!"
For Blackbird’s Show and Tell today, Sarah Louise asks to see our purses or bags.
I am completely indifferent about the Target purse I use at present, which was quite a step down from the Gucci bag that I used BK — Before Kids. I need something with enough room to carry the tissues, calendar, and assorted paraphernalia of children without overloading myself, but also something that is small enough to slip inside a larger backpack, and I am still looking for just the right one.
Here instead is the Allerhand Ergo Backpack, far too cool to call a "diaper bag," and so we use its proper name. I bought this at an outlet mall in Ap Lei Chau last spring, when our old and well-used diaper bag proved not big enough for our day trips around Hong Kong. Note the mobile phone pocket, which I did use after David dragged me protesting mightily into the 20th century, and the little one beneath is still, I think, full of Hong Kong coins and a taxi receipt.
Zippered pouches at the sides are waterproofed to hold baby bottles, if one desires — ours usually stashes the digital camera and spare batteries on one side, and tissues and handwipes or a bottle of water on the other. The main pocket holds spare clothes and whatnot, and a large pocket across the bottom carried our street atlas and the Lonely Planet Hong Kong (Condensed) that served us so well for many months. (Another slim pocket at the back holds a changing mat, still useful in certain circumstances.)
Here is a photo from last April, of the Allerhand in action, this time at Chater Gardens —
Very comfy, very dashing.
A "(silent) poetry reading," from Grace’s Poppies, who requests winter poems. I made a small collection for my own amusement some years ago, and here is one of my favorites from it.
Snow in the Suburbs
Every branch big with it,
Bent every twig with it;
Every fork like a white web-foot;
Every street and pavement mute:
Some flakes have lost their way, and grope back upward, when
Meeting those meandering down they turn and descend again.
The palings are glued together like a wall,
And there is no waft of wind with the fleecy fall.
A sparrow enters the tree,
Whereon immediately
A snow-lump thrice his own slight size
Descends on him and showers his head and eyes,
And overturns him,
And near inurns him,
And lights on a nether twig, when its brush
Starts off a volley of other lodging lumps with a rush.
The steps are a blanched slope,
Up which, with feeble hope,
A black cat comes, wide-eyed and thin;
And we take him in.
— Thomas Hardy (English, 1840-1928)
Paton’s Katrina, destined to become a shrug for Laura’s ballet teacher.
Booking Through Thursday writes, "This week’s questions are brought to you by Deb, reader extraordinaire. Thank you, Deb."
The Knitter’s Almanac projects for February are snuggly babies’ things, a simple blanket, a mat or sleeping bag, a jacket and matching hat, and footed leggings. I made a throw/shawl to Elizabeth’s baby blanket pattern here a few years ago, for my sister, in one of those fortunate coincidences where I had a lot of yarn and Christmas was coming up and I saw the photo and put one and one and one together. I used a plain black wool I’d had stashed in a box under the bed for far too long, and I tried the Gull Stitch Elizabeth recommends, which is very pretty indeed. It made a very handsome throw, if I may say so myself. And another shawl that I made (ostensibly for Laura when she was born, but to be honest, I kept it for myself) was inspired by this, too, although using the Old Shale charted out by Martha Waterman.
I definitely approve of Elizabeth’s views on colors for babies. Soft heather-grey — "especially if you incorporate some white around the edge of the bonnet" — navy blue, greenish-blue Shetland. "And what’s wrong with scarlet?"! (I seem to recall making one of these double-knit mats in a dashing peacock blue. This was, as it happens, my first introduction to double knitting.) The traditional pastel pinks and blues are all right in their way, but I’m always impressed by the less-traditional things that folks come up with for babies.
"Our favorite longies are those on which we used up odd remnants of wool. A green pair has a cute grey color-pattern at the calf, and then becomes steel-grey for the feet. A navy pair has a white pattern at the knees and scarlet calves and feet. They must actually be seen on young legs for their true charm to become apparent." ("Thrift and conservation are in the wind: how delightful to find that using up wool-remains improves the appearance of our finished product"!)
New technique for this month: knitting from the top down. Frankly, I’m a bit surprised that I’ve never done this; there must be dozens of patterns in my collection alone. But I’ve always been a bit leery — like with cutting — that it just looks upside-down. Well … I will let Elizabeth take me by my lily-white hand and lead me over the water. The Gull pattern does look nice upside-down, too, I’ll say that. And personally, I am always grateful to those designers who, like Elizabeth, arrange things so that the fiddly bits of a pattern stitch are on one round and the other round is the "mindless and relaxing one" of knitting all the way!
This is the merino left over from Ene’s Scarf. I also appreciate what Elizabeth has to say about wool. While I understand that some people really do have an allergy to certain fibers, others object to wool simple because they’ve succumbed to the notion that wool is hard to wash, and so I find very amusing Elizabeth’s underhanded methods for dealing with those stubbornly ignorant of the "warmth and comfort of wool": "If I were stuck with a child allergic to wool I would become very sneaky: I would make it a sweater of orlon or whatever, into which I would knit one color-pattern of wool. If this were received and worn without carping comment, I would increase the dose — next sweater, two patterns, next one, three. After twenty sweaters — in theory, at least — I would have a nice normal wool-wearing child. At least I would have tried. If caught at my fell deed, I could always say that the particular color I wanted was only available in wool." "Pass by the synthetic yarn department, then, with your nose in the air." Synthetics have come a long way since 1974, it must be admitted, and I am not so much a snob that I refuse to work with synthetics on principle, but I do love natural fibers the best, by far.
And this just makes me laugh: "My special technique for car-cat-naps is to sit bolt upright, and let the chin drop down as far as it can on the chest, relaxing all neck-muscles. My reflexes are now so conditioned that this pose sends me to sleep almost immediately; the head doesn’t loll, the mouth doesn’t open degradingly, and I like to think that there is no snoring, although the family is in a conspiracy to tell me that I always snore, which is plain nonsense."
I’m starting a new category, "Good Things," for charity knitting. It’s always been important to me to help others, although I admit that I have not been as consistent about it as I should be. But helping Laura recently with service projects for her Brownie troop has made me feel that I should dedicate more of my time to this, and set a better example for my daughters in the process. This category, then, will be a collection of opportunities for knitters such as myself to help others, through multi-, inter-, and non-denominational service organizations.
I didn’t find out about the Orphan Foundation of America’s Red Scarf Project until too late to make this year’s deadline, and then only a few days later, I came across in my pattern stash the reply to my query about the Christmas-at-Sea program run by the Seamen’s Church Institute.
Christmas-at-Sea provides holiday packages to sea and river mariners working on Christmas Day. Included in each package is a handknitted vest, socks, or watch cap and scarf set for sea mariners, and a scarf for river mariners. Unlike, say, the Red Scarf Project, whose only firm requirement is that the scarves be red, the SCI requests that one use specific patterns in superwash or acrylic, and in dark, manly colors. (This is my phrasing of their request. I had a very amusing mental image of the sailors arguing over who would get the purple scarf, but I suspect that this is not the reason.)
I’m happy to borrow the name for this category so that perhaps it may come to mean not only clever solutions to everyday living but also good things in the greater sense.
Blackbird requests our computer for "Show and Tell Friday" this week.
I am something of a computer ignoramus, so I leave the hardware decisions to Bluestocking Tech Support (i.e., David). For our relocation to Hong Kong last year, he bought this reconditioned IBM ThinkPad, mostly because he knew that we were going to have a very small flat to live in, and a laptop certainly doesn’t take up much room! He also rationalized that I would be able to take the laptop on genealogy research trips once we came home, although that hasn’t materialized yet, since after a virus scare we’re not using the big desk computer atal.
I miss my ergonomic keyboard, but the laptop is nice, I must say. It amazes me that it is more powerful than the big desk one. (Someone commented to Blackbird that she looked forward to using a laptop on the couch or in bed, but I must warn you that this thing is hot, and I don’t mean style-wise this time. I always had to put a throw pillow underneath it, to keep the heat from the fan from scorching my legs!)
Knitting, reading, other stuff.
