Mossy Cottage Knits

Abbdar Defined

(No posting on Friday, Dear Readers. I must hie myself off to Day 3 of "The Managerial Use of Medieval Torture Devices.")

For all of you who were convinced to the very core of your knitterly being that Abbdar was Fair Isle, you’ll appreciate this screenshot I took of the polling-software’s chart after one vote (TMK’s as it happens).

Your happiness will be short-lived, however, since this is how it looks now, after the polls are closed, leaning in “gansey’s” favor:

As I said in the comments, this particular vote was truly a horse race. Fair Isle started out winning strongly but then the ganseyites made a run for it. Fair Isle stumbled at the finish line, and we ended up with a 54.9% to 45.1% finish. All the Fair Isle-ites, please report to the glue factory.

So, to recap, we went from a randomly generated nonsense word to a knitting concept for an earth tone, gansey-style hat. I find this to be extremely cool. Thank you, again, for playing along! Now, what do you think a "zraaiq" is? I kid, I kid.

While on the subject of design and colors and such, here's an interesting site I stumbled across while mulling over the idea of color families, ColorSchemer. This section of the site contains thousands of color schemes that you can search by word. For example, while thinking about Abbdar-as-earthy-Fair-Isle (needlessly, as it turned out), I searched on “earth” and got 65 matches, out of which I pulled these two four-color beauts:

To search on this site, click on Search Schemes.

Yesterday, Mother Nature, with some help from TMK, hauled me kicking and screaming into my 47th year (well, to be chronologically accurate, 47th birthday, beginning of 48th year.) But the high drama and coyness was all for show because the truth is, as you can see, I was spoiled beyond all spoiling, thanks to Big Sister, niece, nephew, “mother-in-law” and my other half. As is required by my sister—who knows where I live and will hunt me down like the dawg I am if I don’t—I wore the Birthday Tiara, a little worse for the wear after many years of having been shuttled between Seattle and San Diego and back. It’s not on crooked; the feathers have just been, er, artfully rearranged. (Ignore the schlumpy Jabba the Hut look; let’s just blame it on many, many, many layers of winter clothing. Yeah, that’s it.)

In the packages, a luscious cornucopia of books, clothing, kitchen supplies and, ironically, given my last entry, a Dirt Devil Broom Vac. But I think this piece of equipment and I will be able to come to a meeting of the minds because it’s not a loud, roaring, life-sucking monstrosity but sort of cute and tail-waggingly agreeable, like Frankie in vacuum form. I will keep you posted.

Posted by Ryan at February 7, 2007 12:44 PM