I’m feeling a bit knit-out… two on needles and one around the edges of being ready. Tons of wound-up fiber waiting and nothing I really wanted to knit. This is a dangerous situation. I kept looking at my “completed” page and thinking, “but I’ve don’t that already… I don’t want to do another one of those…” Nothing appealed.
There’s a bit of a panic in the rug room, too, since the last post; had a mad fit in the stash drawers when I couldn’t fit any more blue into its legal-sized, lateral file drawer. Yanked it all out; realized the drawer was half-full of navy and a lot of the less fabulous blues and decided a) to get rid of what I had on hand and b) to not bring any more home. As it is, I have a load in the dryer I don’t have room for in the rug room; three laundry baskets waiting to be sliced, and two black trash bags full waiting to go into the pre-slice laundry baskets. Incoming is gaining on me. I’m about to move some to the attic, where the heat will prevent any of that nasty thrift-shop odor. Why then would I want to be bringing home anything that isn’t either fabulous, or at least interesting?
I’ll allow that there are some colorways I don’t fancy myself; that haven’t been in my personal wardrobe for more than 20 years. However, there’s a case to be made for earth tones, and October was fun to knit (and a quick sale, besides!). I can always work with anything on the red side of the color wheel. But I’ve been having trouble with blue. Not all blues–royal/turquoise/teal anything blue-green is fine. It’s the dusty blues down to navy that stymie me. I don’t like them and they don’t go with anything easily. (IMO, the only color that really goes well with denim is black, or maybe white if it’s a starched cotton dress shirt.) (This is coming from a woman with teal streaks in her hair, BTW.)
So: face facts. I don’t like mid-blues and the stash is gaining, so leave it alone.
This is a scary decision. What if people suddenly stop leaving clothes at the swap shed and I run out of stuff to knit?
Stephanie Pearl-McGhee would be rolling around on the floor in hysterics. Real knitters never run out of stash. It is impossible. If we could somehow transmute our stash into energy, there would be no oil crisis and “fuel” would be a dollar a gallon.
But I worry a little. And yet I leave the blue alone, and promise I’ll knit out what I have and no more.
But what WAS I going to knit? Pulled fiber for something fabulous in purple and teal and olive; a basket full to the brim of hot reds, a pile of odd bits of red-and-white which didn’t quite want to be the same spiral that has turned out so well in Black and White and Black and Gray. Was I out of ideas already, and not even 30 down on my way to 100? did I have to knit the whole list all over again?
Of course not. I wouldn’t be writing if that were the case. John and I visited the National Textile Museum in Washington, DC, over Easter weekend. Through a bit of miscalculation and a Beltline traffic jelly (it didn’t quite rate “jam,”), we arrived at the museum at 4 PM, when it closed at 5. Fly-by. Look at the main exhibits; check out the gift shop; John bought me a fabulous ribbon-embroidered bag that works for some of my knitting; look at the books; go. I had enough time to realize I really wanted to know more about Bogolanfini Mud Cloth, by Sam Hilu and Irwin Hershey (Shiffer, 2005).
Interlibrary loan is another option. The book arrived Thursday and by 11 PM, my idea well was overflowing again. Didn’t hurt that I snagged yet another fabulous book by Jinny Beyer (Patchwork Patterns) on a quick dash down the 745.5 shelves in the Cary Public Library on my way out. That makes Jinny 3/3 on great textile books, albeit only one (Tessellations) that I had to own.
Flip pages, mark patterns with sticky notes, and come back before work this morning to start harvesting. Bogolanfini comes with a CD of the fabrics; the same ones make me gasp this evening as much as they did last night. Mud cloth, somewhat obviously, comes in the colors of … mud. Counterintuitively, used clothing is rarely brown–that’s the hardest color of the ones I collect. Literalness has never been a limitation for me. I can see these patterns in bright red and black just fine.
The immediate future will be filled with a quick dog walk–they’ve been neglected in my chasing around after expensive books and new pickup trucks (in which they have not yet ridden). Sometime soon, I have to find and learn a graphics program that will let me test laying out quilt squares and other repetitive patterns. It just takes too long to draw all the variations out by hand every time. Stay tuned.
