Fiber Raven Soiree

Val-deri

I think I know why neighbors get violent with each other. A perfect example is what my neighbor John does to drive me crazy. He's always cheerful, always working on his house or yard or spending time with his 3yo son. Saturday he and the little guy walked out to the mailbox together. In his usual ever-happy mood, John was singing a song. I heard this from my kitchen:

"Val-deri,Val-dera,
Val-deri, Val-dera-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha
Val-deri,Val-dera.
My knapsack on my back!"

You know the one I mean? "I love to go a wandering...." and all that? It is insidious. It gets inside your brain and you can think of no other tune. It keeps you awake all night and makes you want to go hiking and wear liederhosen and a hat with a feather in it.

By Sunday morning I had had it. Lisa, John's wife, called to let me know that Jojo had taken our bedroom curtain out on the roof with him, and I took the opportunity to let her know just how I felt about John's Fal-de-ra. Her response?

"Hey Jude, don’t make it bad.
Take a sad song and make it better.
Remember to let her into your heart,
Then you can start to make it better..."

I'll never complain again. I listened to the radio all day, and Hey Jude is still in my head.

There's been a change in the weather, and the northwest pole is looking more familiar: comforting gray skies accompany the sound of rain soft through the trees; cool refreshing breezes greet us in the morning and stay with us all day; poodles and other creatures track wet footprints throughout the house. This is good knitting weather.

In the past few days I have made progress on Trip-Trap, Little Rivers, and Dragonfly.

Although I like my Trip-Trap, I look forward to knitting another one. The rules of the knit seem deceptively simple, but as I continue I realize there are a lot of little tricks to making it look perfect. These tricks are well documented by Ms. Hoxbro, but my eyes like to pretend they know what they are reading when they skim. They don't notice the little things, like that on every row you slip the first stitch knitwise except for the first row, which you knit regularly, or the last row, on which you slip the first stitch purlwise.

TT uses the knit cast-on, and there are two different ways to do this cast-on. The one I use for lace a la Sharon Miller produces a lacey edge, and as far as I knew this was the way to do a knit cast-on. However, I accidentally discovered that if I twist the stitch as I put it back over the left needle, I get a much more attractive starting edge, which is better for TT. So, advised by my Knitting Consultant to continue with this cardigan rather than frog it, I will see how much more I can learn before I devise the perfect trip-trap.

I am continuing to enhance my online Jamieson color palette. You may have noticed that there are now little buttons beside Yellow, Turquoise and Magenta, with an "A" on them. These are temporary buttons (i.e. the buttons will change, not the functionality) which lead to another page on which you will find the colors analagous to the main color. Analogous colors are those that lie on either side of a color. I have chosen to include three colors to each side. I have also chosen some of these colors for a "virtual swatch" which is also shown on this page to illustrate an analogous use from the colors. I'm happy with the Yellow Analogous swatch, but the others leave something to be desired. It will get easier once my Swatch Slave comes to life. I'm working on it. If I had time, I would actually knit the swatch to see how it compares to the virtual one.

As time allows, I will be adding similar pages to all the colors, and also pages for complementary, split-complementary and triadic schemes. This is my further attempt at self-education and an intense familiarity with good color combinations, especially with Jamieson yarn.

Going through my yarn yesterday, I find that I have an awful lot of partial balls of Jamieson & Smith Shetland yarn, too, and if I still have half an ounce of motivation after Spindrift is exhausted, I'll see what I can do with that.

I was very surprised that there is only one color that is in the Magenta group. It would be interesting to see if I can use my recently-acquired dyeing knowledge to dye yarns that would fill out the short groups. So much to do!

The Ferals meet tonight, and I will try to remember to take my camera for updates for our Miss(ed) Janine.

Posted by Sheila at August 23, 2004 06:59 AM | TrackBack