Mossy Cottage Knits

What I Did This Summer, Part II

We spent a goodly portion of the first day of my family’s visit at the Pacific Science Center, the ultimate kiddy nirvana, in no small part due to its insect display and butterfly house. I won’t go into any details about the insect display since I’m sure my more-sensitive readers don’t want to hear about giant walking sticks, Madagascar hissing cockroaches, carrion beetles, or the plastic mock-ups of foods made with edible insects, like, oh, grub omelettes, but the butterfly house was wonderful.

The lush greenery in the butterfly house.

Here is one of the butterflies, a sizeable dude who, just before I pressed the shutter button, clapped its wings shut and stubbornly insisted on displaying only the drab brown outside of his wings, not the brilliant metallic blue inside, but since this was one of my first days of using the digital camera on my very own, just like a big girl, I was pleased with the photo nonetheless.

This, my favorite photo, shows a diaphanous white butterfly—also a sizeable dude—that we think had just come out of its cocoon because its wings were still a little crumpled, and it was vibrating them vigorously, as if to dry them off (unless, of course, it was in fact the rare Bornean White Crumple-Winged Vibrating Butterfly).

But most fascinating of all was the volunteer whose job it was to put plastic sandwich boards, like the ones in the supermarket that say “Caution. Wet Floor” (or, for you Californians, “Cuidado. Piso mojado"), over any butterfly that was resting on the floor. But butterflies are by nature restless critters so they would only stay under the sandwich board for a brief moment and then flit away, which meant Volunteer Boy spent his days constantly picking up, moving, and placing the little sandwich boards. That’s it. That was his job.

Friday, the Ballard Locks and world’s perkiest tugboat!

Knitting Knews
At the Soiree, Janine helped me pick out colors for my "Janine Pillow." I first came out of the Wall O' Yarn room proudly clutching the skeins of yarn that I thought made up The Best Knitting Color Palette Ever in the History of Mankind. Janine took one look, guided me back to Wall O' Yarn room, made a few gentle suggestions, and fifteen minutes later I came out again with an entirely different palette, containing not one of my original skeins of yarn, and yet somehow my ego wasn't the least bit ruffled. She's a very talented girl, that Janine. Let's hope she doesn't have any plans to take over the world, 'cause she could do it, and we'd enjoy the ride.

So, in my stumblebum way, I've spent the last few days making my first attempts at knitting the pillow. Not being one to swatch, once I had found a Celtic design I liked, I leapt right into knitting the pillow. Although my "Janine palette" consisted of five colors, for my first stab at the pillow, I could only realistically wrap my head around the thought of using three, and here are the results:

The yellow is actually a very light, tweedy yellow, a combination of super-light yellow and medium-coral fibers. The green is just a medium green, pretty close to what you see in the picture. The blue is a midnight blue.

I slept on this color design for a couple of nights, showed it to my pals at Feral Knitters, and slowly found myself mulling over the idea of—gasp!—using four colors and—double gasp!—knitting a 32-stitch swatch instead of the entire frickin' pillow, and here is what I churned out last night:

In real life, this swatch is much prettier and the color changes are much subtler. The pink yarn in the picture is actually a beautiful, light, tweedy peach, very similar in feel to the yellow, and the green in this swatch is lighter than the one I used in my first attempt but not tweedy. My true test was to show it to The Mysterious K, the Color and Design Queen, and she, too, gave it a thumbs up. All is right with my world.

Posted by Ryan at June 23, 2004 10:37 AM