3KCBWDAY1 - Eskimimi Knitting and Crochet Blog Week Day One

Today is the start of Eskimimi Knitting and Crochet Blog Week with the invitation to post every day for a week on a set range topics - a specific one for each day. It's been enormous fun thinking about this week and it's set all sorts of challenging hares running in my head! I hope you enjoy visiting here and if you type the heading of this post into your search bar you should find lots of other posts by other bloggers on the same topic.

I don't know which is going to be more fun, the writing of my own posts or the reading of other people's! Today the brief is what's on the card above. (Thank you, Anne, of Life In Mud Spattered Boots, for the tip about the card-making generator website - I found it mesmerising to play with!). I'm going to include one of these cards each day with a resume of each day's brief so that you know what's what if you aren't a participator (yet!)

I think Christina Rossetti's poem, "What is pink?", which I had to learn off by heart at school when I was about nine years old and didn't think much of at the time, more or less sums up my instinctive approach to the yarn colours I am drawn to.

What Is Pink? by Christina Rossetti

What is pink? A rose is pink

by the fountain's brink.

What is red? A poppy's red

in its barley bed.

What is blue? The sky is blue

where the clouds float thro'.

What is white? A swan is white

sailing in the light.

What is yellow? Pears are yellow

rich and ripe and mellow.

What is green? Grass is green,

with small flowers between.

What is violet? Clouds are violet

in the summer twilight.

What is orange? Why, an orange,

just an orange!

Rossetti expresses the colour of each object very simply, you might say simplistically. As any painter knows, nothing is simply one colour in reality but the child-like simplicity of the poet's mode of expression distils the essence of each colour and gives it a wonderful lightness somehow. And the way that she pools them together makes a kind of simple but charming, multi-coloured bouquet.

I am drawn to that essence and lightness of colour and their collection together like a magpie to anything shiny!

Clear bright, vivid colours that reflect the light. Refractive, sunshine colours rather than subtler, more complex and muted shades. Have a peep in one or two of my stash baskets and you'll see what I mean.

These are some of my favourite Cascade cotton colours. They are beautiful both to look at and to use and I come back to them time and time again.

The largest thing I've crocheted with them was my Japanese Flower Scarf and it was a joyous journey of brightness to make from start to finish (except when I had to undo and re-crochet the first twenty flowers I had made because I didn't read the pattern properly to begin with and they all had too many petals to join properly!)

Unfortunately the Cascade Cotton is not cheap and even I, with strong Mrs Frugalnot tendencies, have baulked at making blankets with it. The instinct for light clear colours though remains and I use the lovely bright sunny colours of Rico Creative Cotton, which is much cheaper, for these.

But rules are always made to be broken and at the beginning of this year I thought I might break the sunshine colour habit, not permanently but just for a change and give in to my other weakness which is for variegated yarn. I find it insidiously beguiling as a concept and the discovery of a divinely soft Alpaca mix in the most bewitching, variegated shades was enough to make me take the plunge. After the delight of making the multi-coloured Japanese flower scarf I thought I would begin another in the variegated stuff. 

The colour is called "Deep-Sea" and it is exactly that, deep indigo and olive green that changes to turquoise and a soft smoky blue before lightening to a silvery, bluey grey. All should have been harmony with me, my yarn and my hook but it wasn't - in fact there developed a stand-off of serious proportions! And I discovered something about myself and my relationship with colour. The yarn was beautiful. It is beautiful. I love the variegations. It was easy to work. But the joy that had been there with making the flowers for the previous scarf was gone; it had vanished or evaporated seemingly without reason or trace. The project limped slowly along for a bit before finally stopping dead as a doornail in its tracks. I left it for a while thinking I might come back to it. I didn't. And secretly, I knew I wouldn't.

In fact I started something else. Not a scarf, but my "Summer Has Come From The Sunny Land Blanket" using the loot from my Teensy Yarn Spree even though after finishing the Granny Stripe blanket here I had said to myself "No more blankets for a while". 

This was a different story - the little pile of squares seemed to grow all by itself. A quarter of the blanket is already finished and so far, every square is different!

What was so different about the two projects that meant that one grew more or less while I slept and the other couldn't get past the Monopoly "Go" square let alone collect £200?! It wasn't the obvious thing about muted colours versus bright ones - I proved this to myself last week - all to be revealed later this week - it was the fact that in making the little squares there was unpredictability and constant choices to be made about which colours to use, whereas with the variegated flowers there were no choices and no unpredictability. I hate to say it, but making the variegated flowers bored me while the little squares constantly dance ahead of me tantalising me with the colour combination possibilities and keeping me interested.

So I had to have a Sad Undoing of the variegated flowers. I had done about twelve or fifteen flowers altogether but every time I looked at them the whole thing looked like less and less like a beautiful Japanese flower scarf in-the-making and more and more like a pile of old seaweed left by a neap tide. Add to that the killer fact that I now knew I would never have the interest to finish the scarf and there was nothing for it but to unravel. Ouch! And unfortunately the beautiful soft silk mix yarn does not unravel at all easily - the outer petals came undone OK but then nothing moved. I have done my best and have managed to salvage most of the yarn although it's had to be knotted repeatedly where it broke. Mrs T is not a very patient unraveller and has a tendency to tug hard when she meets resistance - not a good move with this particular yarn!

Now the problem is that I have, ahem, quite a lot of, ahem, quite expensive yarn to use up ... in some fashion that will not fall foul of the boredom factor that cut in before. But my Needles & Natter friend Sarah may have the answer for that in a pattern for a very simple knitted scarf. The Pros of this idea are several:

1. No two rows are the same because of the pattern of increase - there is an element therefore of unpredictability - good news for your boredom threshhold, Mrs T. 
2. The variegations in the yarn will show up much better in a continuous piece of fabric than in the lacy effect of the crocheted flowers and again there will be an unpredictable element in the way that the colours emerge - good news again. 
3. Sarah assures me that the pattern is Very Simple - even better news. 
4. The pattern uses very fat needles so will work up quickly - with a bit of luck quickly enough to defeat Mrs T's lack of stickability and patience! - Fantastic! 

But there are also a couple of Cons:

1. I don't really knit ... or so I thought! 
2. What other people label as Very Simple may not be beyond Mrs T's powers to make a Pig's Ear of! Unpredictability that is potentially not at all good news! 

We will see!

I realise, to sum up, that I have to face the fact that I am a flibbertigibbet with the attention span of one of these as far as colour and yarn are concerned!

Repeat after me, Mrs T, "I must not let myself loose on projects that do not reflect that!" 

With ones that do reflect that, however, there is no stopping me!

Now where's my yarn shopping list?!!!