Mossy Cottage Knits

Say "Cheese!"

An example of what it’s like to work for the state:

In the private sector, it’s not unusual for snacks to be provided at meetings, usually donuts, pastries, danishes, muffins, maybe fruit, certainly coffee and decaf, juice, water and sodas. Compare that to the state environment; compare that, in fact, to today’s meeting where we were given…cubes of cheese. Yep. Dotted few and far between on our immense conference table, small blue plastic bowls containing toothpicks and…cubes of cheese. It felt very Skinnerian. Ask a good question, make a good suggestion, get…a cube of cheese.

Knitting Knews
Janine’s presentation on Fair Isle knitting at Guild was right on the money. She made a focused attempt to reach out to and reassure knitters like me who were born without the color gene. (Before I go any further, to put Janine’s place in the knitting world in perspective for the Dear Readers who do not know her, one of her creations—Dragonfly River Vest—is in Meg Swansen’s book “Sweaters From Camp.” Take a gander if you can. Dear Reader Sheila has been working on this project. You can see a photo here.) Janine surprised us all when she prefaced her talk by saying that she has only been knitting for six years, which caused quite the astonished muttering among audience members. She then described her journey to the world of Fair Isle knitting, how she started out as a weaver, how she spent years simply learning and absorbing the information provided by other, more-experienced knitters, how she learned to take color and design inspiration from the world around her, and how she learned to avoid certain pitfalls such as assuming someone else’s way is “right,” assuming you don’t have the ability to pick colors, listening to your negative voice, and being afraid to make mistakes or to frog designs or colors that aren’t working. She was even brave enough to whip out her most current “failure,” a Christmas stocking that, color-wise, isn’t working out quite the way she envisioned. In typical Janine fashion, she's going to solve the problem by simply cutting off the offending cuff and knitting on a new one. Oy. Imagine!

Thank you, Janine, for a wonderful presentation!

On the Baby Norgi front, I chickened out, but not in a breast-beating, hair-rending way, just in a mild, wimping out way. I opted for one line of blue followed by plain yellow stockinette so I didn't have to do stranded purling. So far, so good. In the meantime, for my Knon-Knorgi Knitting, I'm making a swatch based on this cross-stitch pattern. I have learned a lot from this small swatch, including how easy it is to get lost in a bastardized, half-Fair Isle, half-intarsia world. Pictures next week!

Posted by Ryan at May 21, 2004 10:00 AM