I know you came here looking for knitting, and I'm really sorry to have to tell you that there is nothing more to see here than a black tube that persists in being a plain black tube, and sapping my will to live.
But don't go away just yet! There's yarn to look at, and even the opportunity to help decide the fate of one particular yarn.
First up, green yarn. (Sorry if it looks black or grey on your monitor. It's dark green).
This is destined to become Cinxia. The nice people at Webs advised me that it was a good substitue for the Classic Elite Renaissance specified in the pattern. It feels nice and soft and I'm happy with the colour. It's a bit darker than I had imagined but still foresty and elvish.
Then, there's this:
This yarn was intended for a Picovoli, but there's no way it can be my Picovoli since that was supposed to be somewhere in the deep red spectrum. I chose the yarn very carefully, scrolling up and down, leaning first towards colour no. 19, then thinking I wanted to it to be grey, and finally picking 12012 because according to my monitor it was a deep soft purply-red, similar to a favourite jumper.
See the sweater? See the yarn? Not similar.
I thought it would be a lovely berry colour. Berries, in my world, are a good thing, from the sharp acid claret cranberry, to the soft sweet wine-coloured food-for-silk mulberry and the sour, fragrant, mysterious deep purple blackcurrant.
Then there is another kind of berry altogether. The Ribena currant.
To be fair, I did choose this yarn specially because I thought it was about time I took my first uncertain steps into the World of Colour. (This, by the way, is my entire collection of sweaters. Adventurous, eh?)
But this yarn is so brightly, brazenly, unapolagetically royal purple, that it sent me reeling backwards on opening the box, and it seems that those few tottering steps took me further than I was prepared to tread. I now find that I have travelled far beyond the city of Berry Tones and am deep in the Land of Bright, maybe even heading towards the capital of Garish. Eeek.
So now I have three options:
a) Try to sell it on ebay. I don't like this idea because I once had a run-in with a seller who sent me a damaged product and then hurled abuse around my profile when I left a 'neutral' comment on their feedback site, so I limit my trips to ebay-land and go only after dark, walking with my head down and collar up.
b) Stash it and hope that one day I have a purple idea.
c) Go ahead with the Picovoli (I really, really want to knit this top, and don't have the funds to run out and by different-coloured yarn for it at the moment), and hope that I enjoy running around being mistaken for the primary ingredient of an iconic kids' drink.
What do you think?
2 comments:
Idea #4: Could it be overdyed?
Not that I think it is bad the way it is--I rather like it actually. But I understand the what you want/what you get disparity. The internets are dangerous in that way.
And it is just one more reason why I wish people would give their yarn colors names, rather than numbers. Of course names are subjective--and in Rowan's case next to useless, although pleasantly evocative--but one has to think that that particular yarn could have been called, you know, Ribena--which would have stopped you from ordering in a way that "12012" just wouldn't.
Welcome to blogland, Philippa! I quite like the color of the Cathay - maybe it will just want to be something else if you keep it in the stash? Or can you exchange it for another color? I've enjoyed reading your entries - especially the one on Paris, and also your thoughts on your reading. I've recommended "The Silent Woman" to my dad, who just finished "The Bell Jar" and was asking about biographies of Plath. So thanks for that. And incidentally, I don't think Ben Jonson's "Epicoene" has much to do with Malcolm's choice of title - the character in his play who is "the silent woman" is a boy in drag who is seen as the perfect wife because he never speaks. It's a weird, rather misogynistic play. (I taught it once in grad school - my specialty is Renaissance drama, although I'm not a huge Jonson fan, really).
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