purlsandmurmers

Ready to roll

We are off to Knoxville early tomorrow and will be gone around 10 days.  I have managed to pack a few travel projects.  I had hoped to take the Vancouver sweater as well but it doesn't look like that one is going along.  It is getting late.  I don't have that together and we are leaving early tomorrow.  I probably have too much knitting as it is.

Generally, the projects I am taking are simple.  With a 900 mile drive each way I would normally get lots of knitting done.    DH has always felt it is his duty to drive and mine to sit and knit and I can't say that I have objected all that much, although I generally do enjoy driving.  Last trip I drove almost half the trip, probably for the first time in our 21 years of marriage.  This time he has already told me that he doesn't feel up to driving much, so it looks like I will be driving more. 

But I had already pulled out the yarn and packed it up.  So I may or may not be knitting.  Either way, I won't be blogging as I am not taking the computer this trip.  I haven't gotten as far along as I would have hoped with taking pictures and getting things together on Ravelry either, so I have little to show you.

My first project is a ribbed shrug using this yarn:

It is a quick project on size US 10 needles and I am already about 1/3 of the way through it.

Color Meme

I copied this from Kristi over at fiber fool but I actually got it from Marji .  I haven't read my way through everything yet, but I have been thinking about this color meme.  Well anything about color is always intersting, isn't it?

1. What is your current favorite color?  purples and wine reds generally, although deep true green and deep blue green run very close behind.

2. Had your favorite color changed over the years? Yes and No.  I always come back to purplish shades or greens, but I do go through phases where some color or another catches my fancy and i obsess about it continually.  Sometimes this is a color that is trendy at the time but often it is not.

3. Is your current favorite color one that is currently trendy? (Do you see it in the fashion rags or on the clothes rack or in the linen aisle right now? How about 5 years ago?) I don't think either purple or deep blue green is particularly trendy now.  The greens that have been trendy of late have been too yellow or too bright.  I am however currently somewhat fascinated by orange, which is trendy, and bright yellow.  The bright burgundies are also in it seems, and those fit into my general "purplish" purview.  They go well with orange as well.

4. What is your favorite color combination?  That is a much harder question to answer as it is much more variable.  I like deep dark browns, the color of dark chocolate with most of the cool pastels.  I love dark brown and light bright turquoise.  Fuschia and bright orange are a perenial summer favorite.  I love midnight navy with green, blue-turquoise (as opposed to the greener kind) with some purples, softer greens with gray.  I think there are too many to name, they vary with my moods and the season. 

Favorite three-color combinations are deep prune/muted leaf green/wine or wine/khaki green/and deep pansy purple, wine/khaki green/deep taupe brown are also very nice.  In fact  I can go on an on about my favorite combinations that include shades of purple, red-purple, and purple-blue, mixing them with almost every other color in some combination or another.  Favorite color combinations that are outside of this range include red/black/white  and  yellow/light or medium gray/dark gray.  Another really powerful color combination for me, perhaps a little too intense to use often is yellow/purple/black.

AT this moment I am fascinated by Medium jeans-blue/pine green/amber and white as a combination and combinatons of shadow-blue and mineral-blue with yellow and olive.

5. Is that combination a popular one? (Is it use in prints you see in the stores and catalogs and magazines now? How about 5 years ago?)  brown and turquoise is back again.  Orange and pink are popping up again as well, primarily because orange is fashionable now.  Otherwise some of my color combinations are probably popular at any given time. 

6. What is your favorite way of using color in your knitting? (Are you a stranded knitter? Do you prefer simple stripes? Do you prefer just accents at the hems/collars?)  Hmmm.  I've done stripes.  Often I just combine whole blocks of a color, like entire garments mixed with garments of other colors.  I can play with my combinations more that way.  In terms of color-knitting, I have done stranded knitting, and enjoy it, but I also like intarsia.  I tend to like an all over pattern like more than isolated spots of color, unless we are layering whole garments as mentioned above.


7. What colors look good on you? reds and greens are probably best.

8. What colors look bad on you? orange and Intense pure Blue and their attendant colors.

9. Do you wear colors that don’t look good on you just because you like them? That is really a tough question.  There are colors I can't wear near my face but can mix with colors that I can wear, as for example in the discussion of orange above.  But I don't wear most oranges or yellow-browns, or golden colors.  There is some part of me that feels I want to wear any color I love and will try to find a wear something if I love it enough, and I have occasionally fallen in love with something in every portion of the color wheel.    Generally my skin tone is cool as is my hair.  But my eyes are green and they have a lot of olive/yellow in them, and there are certain warm yellow greens that are quite attractive on me.  As I have gotten older my hair has actually gotten darker, it used to have a lighter, warmer tone, so I am heading more toward cooler colors. But I can't say that I am purely one season.  Technically I am a summer but pastels don't particularly suit me and some fall colors do.  So I find this whole color thing terribly complicated. Again my hair and skin are cool and my eyes are warmer.  Intense pure blue is almost as bad on me as intense pure orange.

10. What is your favorite neutral color? black/white/ivory/tan/brown/gray – if brown or gray do you prefer cool or warm versions of those or does it matter? And, how dark?  Deep brown, more to the cool side than the warm side.  Grays, but grays need to be more neutral or warm.  Blue grays can be difficult just as true blues can be difficult.   Increasingly black, which was too strong for me when my hair was lighter and I was younger, and is better now.  I assume that eventually the gray will gain a bigger stronghold in my hair, I will be 50 next year, I will eventually taper more toward wearing more grays, but for now I am enjoying black.

11. Is there a sweater pattern that uses more than one color that you’d like to make, but you wish to change the colors from what is published? If yes, which one? What do you not like about the published colors?  There is always at least one each season. The problem is that I usually find the chosen colorway to be strikingly beautiful and am never as happy with alternate colorways that I devise that are more suited to my particular coloring.   In colorwork patterns particularly this can be quite difficult, or perhaps it is not but I don't understand the complexities of color enough to pull it off.

This season I am fascinated by  Eunny Jang's Autumn Rose pullover.  The problem with it is that the colors are probably too autumnal for me to wear, although there are colors in the sweater that I can wear.  But I really like the published colors and a part of the reason I love the sweater is that I love the color combinations; I am just not sure I could wear it.  I think the only way I could happily adapt it is to make a large swatch in the published colors and then make swatches in my alternate colorways and live with them for a bit to see what worked for me.

The problem is that there are so many things I want to knit that I am not sure I want to devote this much energy to planning this sweater without actually getting a sweater in return.

A clost full of sweaters and nothing to wear.

It surprises me that given all the sweaters I have knitted over the years, and the number of sweaters piled on the shelves of my closet, that I could not find a sweater to wear today.  It is not even that I don't have any appropriate sweaters, just that I don't have the sweater I want to wear TODAY.

I think I have the yarn for that sweater.  I probably already have a pattern picked out.  I probably have several patterns picked out and I probably have the appropriate yarns stashed.  And truthfully, even if I started knitting today, it would not be on my back today.  In fact by the time I finish the sweater in question, and I am envisioning a 3/4 or long sleeve cotton or cotton blend sweater with a casual weekend kind of feel, it will be too cold to wear it and I will be annoyed with myself yet again for knitting something I can't wear right away. 

You know that is how sweaters end up on the UFO pile....I start them with great intentions but when they are near to being finished it is the wrong season to wear them so they get put aside and forgotten.  When the right season rolls around again, and it always does, they remain forgotten because I am already dreaming of and working on new sweaters which exert a much stronger pull than the old mostly-finished sweater in the UFO drawer.

And so yet again I find myself with a closet filled with sweaters and no sweater to wear.

Does one ever catch up? 

More hats

I had a post written in my mind on Thursday but it languished there and never found escape. 

I had another post on Friday, but was too tired to write, probably because I came home from knitting group/class and then sat up knitting until 2:30 before finally going to bed and having to be rousted up by workmen 5 hours later.

There has been a little bit of knitting, but not enough.  I did however spend a lot of time on Ravelry, beginning to add some kind of accounting of my yarn stash -- a truly daunting process. 

And I have spent a lot of time looking at patterns, and my yarn, and thinking about what projects I will have to work on while I am also working on Vancouver; you know, the kind of projects that I need for time spent in the car, or those evenings when I am too tired to think while I knit, or for jut plain old-fashioned escape knitting.

In the meantime I am still knitting hats.  They fit my purposes at the moment:

There is a child's wool hat knit from a leftover skein of something or another:

This will go in my box of hats, scarvse, and mittens that I donate to Morse school in Poughkeepsie every year.  It is not fully populated this year, that box, so perhaps it is a good thing that I think there are several more hats in me before I get tired of knitting them.

I also knit two hats for Owen

The brown one is leftover Karabella SuperCashmee about 2/3 of a skein that was left over from my rice stitch cardigan.  The cotton hat matches a little sweater I knit Owen last year, before he was born but which just about fits him now.  I dont' usually think about knitting winter hats out of cotton, but it may be more appropritate for a Tennessee winter than the heavy cashmere.  But then again, nothing is too good for one's grandson now is it?

Introducing Vancouver

There has been enough commitment phobia around here of late.  It was time for it to end.   I present a beginning:

I have started the Anny Blatt sweater I posted about a few weeks back.  The yarn was aired out and some of it was reskeined, washed and then wound back into balls. 

This will not be a speedy project.  I am working on size 3 needles, which is good for me as the pattern is written for size 4 and I ONLY WENT DOWN ONE SIZE.  Even so, I am using three different yarns and the pattern involves a 9 row pattern repeat which includes garter stitch, one row which is bound off purlwise, and then three rows of crochet before the stitches are picked up again and the entire process is started over. 

When I started the swatch I was grumbling constantly. primarily at that point about the binding-off.  I don't like binding off purl-wise, but already I am getting pretty adept at it, and certainly by the end of the sweater it will be completely natural.  I also had trouble seeing the stitches to pick up for the crochet rows, but navy is difficult to see, not perhaps as impossible as black on aging eyes, but still.  The light at Thursday night knitting class/group is not good for this and this will not be a Thursday night project.  This of course means that I have to find a Thursday night project, a task not yet accomplished.

So although I grumbled, I am in fact enjoying this project very much.  I moves s.l.o.w.l.y.  It requires light.  It requires attention.  Even though I could crochet before I could knit, maintaining gauge in crochet does not come as naturally to me as it does with knitting.  Still, I am happy and calm when working.  It will be a pleasure.  I like the process.  I like the fabric I am creating.  It will be a joy to wear the finished cardigan, whenever that may be. 

Expect to see several other projects in the meantime.