Tag Archives: brown sheep burly spun

morning without

Posted on by

always strikes me as strange that some mornings i’m so glad to wake up to the sound of steady rain and on others even a grey sky feels gloomy.  more about what’s inside me than what’s outside i think.

been reknitting ‘shining around’ in city tweed hw from knit picks this week.  it’s a much lighter weight yarn so i’ve doubled it all the way through and gone down a needle size.  the pillow will be smaller in the end than the original burly spun version, but pillows of all sizes are always welcome on my couch.

reknitting brings to mind what i was doing, what ground i was gaining and where i was grasping to maintain my position when i was knitting the first version.  i guess i am a ‘process knitter’ after all.

now, you’ll never know when the pillow’s done but, having carefully checked before i joined to knit in the round that there were no twists, i got 7 rounds in toward the pillow’s center and realised i was knitting a mobius which would never become a pillow no matter how much i wanted it to.  sigh.

one minute of catering to a distraction is all it takes for me to begin to spin, or in this case knit, off-kilter.  nevertheless … i love that word ‘nevertheless’.  always have.  there’s something about the idea that it doesn’t matter a lick what came before or how i feel or what urge is stirring in my gut.  that what comes next has nothing to do with what’s been said, or what hasn’t.  it’s a choice. oh how i love that  … i choose to go on, rightly.  which in this case meant frogging back all 7 rounds to restart at the knitting in the round bit of the pattern. 

nevertheless …

 ‘morning without clouds’ taken from 23:4 of 2nd samuel

perspective

Posted on by

'stretching ...

… the line’

so my loosey goosey method of storing yarn has led to this.  and i like it.  the smooth and even  rows of the cloudlike burly spun contrasts so interestingly with the mercurial personality of the aquarella.

today it feels a bit like life:  the organized bits crammed right up against the ducks that refuse to stay all neatly in a row.  praiseworthy actions tucked closer than sardines in a can to the urges that should be resisted.  so like my life.

this is knit in one long flat strip and then sewn up at the edges.  it keeps the stripes from having that changing colors blurp that can happen knitting stripes in the round.  with stitches this big the sewing up is easy.  you just thread your tapestry needle through the end stitch of each row being sure to keep the color changes lined up when you come to them.

today my mind is a deepish well.  so one more ‘like life’ idea.  the stripes here are thin on one end and thick on the other, so depending on your vantage point the look really changes.

funny how the same conversation can be heard

to mean two almost completely opposite things

by two different friends or such.

funny like hmmm …

(not ha-ha).

 

 ‘stretched the line’ is taken from 38:5 of job

proximity

Posted on by

the subject came up, how do you keep your yarn safe where moths can’t destroy it?

lots of ideas were tosed around in the taunton s’n’b:  plastic bins, wishful thinking, cedar, special plastic bags from walmart.  all well and good, but my grandma keeps my yarn safe

from moths.

sort of.

see grandma had these big metal canisters in her carport.  when she no longer needed them, the canisters came to me.  they sit on the floor and stand about halfway up my thigh with lids on top the size of large pizza pans.  they arrived full of her things which have now found their niches about the house leaving them free for my yarn to lay claim to.

now my friend h has a beautifully elaborate system of sorting and storing her yarn in it’s own special closet.  my yarn is divided a bit more willy-nilly.  there are two large bins stacked on top of each another: one of wool and one of cotton.  nearby are the smaller bins i have picked up at thrift stores and yard sales.  these are mostly divided by weight: one for fingering, one for worsted, and one packed with a virtual rainbow of allhemp6.  there’s also a red one full of what i think i’ll use next and often on top of the lids are the leftover skeins that i’ve yet to take the time to put back inside.

i tell you all this to explain how the burly spun and the aquarella, an unlikely pair, have both wound up in the same pillow.  the 1st  is as orange as orange can be, very bright, and very very thick while the 2nd is all sorts of muted shades (red to orange to brown) and the weight varies inch by inch as it is thickly and thinly spun throughout.  i’m fairly sure i would never have thought to put them together, but as i pried the lid of the ‘wool’ bin open a few days back, i saw that they had rolled together and were sitting there at the edge a little tangled into each other.  and they looked good together.  it struck me right then that the smoothness of one complimented the unevenness of the other both in color and in weight.  who knew?

we’re told, ‘bad friends will destroy you’, so perhaps it is also true that good friends (even unexpected good friends) will build you up.  or at least make things a bit more comfy as you go along.  i am expecting this pillow to be very comfy.

knock, knock

Posted on by

wallace and grommet.

d on the couch beside me.

the lingering of all that ‘away in a manger’ means.

sz 13 needles wrapped in w’s brown sheep ‘orange you glad’ burly spun.

                     knock, knock.  who’s there?  banana.  banana who?

              knock, knock.  who’s there?  banana.  banana who?

       knock, knock.  who’s there?  orange.  orange who?

                               orange you glad i didn’t say banana?

well, orange you glad?