Here’s what I learned about colorwork last week:

Project: “Mist” by Kim Hargreaves, from Rowan’s A Yorkshire Fable

Yarn: Rowan Yorkshire Tweed 4-Ply, eight shades

Needles: US #2 and #3

This beret is worked flat and then seamed up. This presents the special challenge of colorwork on purl rows. The center line of that teal band with brown and white crosses? Pure fiery hell, my friends. It’s the only line of the chart where Kim introduces a third color, and naturally it happened to fall on a WS row. I think the working of it may have taken me about half an hour. You bet your boots I realized this was going to be a problem from the outset, and if I could have thought of a way to knit this puppy in the round I would have. But alas, I possess neither 16″ circulars nor #3 double pointeds. And I confess I was concerned about the jogs looking messy anyway. So I worked it as given.

Overall, I’m pretty happy with the result. I scrapped the suggested pompon (yes, that’s the correct spelling – you can blame the French), because those are for the birds. I notice the folks who did the photo shoot for the book agree with me. I can just picture the Rowan fashion editor stalking the models with a pair of scissors – snip snip! – and little colored balls of fluff skittering away over the Yorkshire moors like so many grouse chicks. (Do they have grouse in Yorkshire?) Anyway, the hat looks rather ducky, although it needs to be blocked over a dinnerplate (thanks, EZ!) to achieve proper tam shape. Here’s what’s less ducky:

Ends, the curse of colorwork. Scores and scores of Medusa-like ends. Minus the ends, I love the purl side of fair isle, or anything stripey. I’ve long intended to knit a striped baby sweater intentionally wrong-side out.

So what did I learn about colorwork from this project, besides the devilish dexterity necessary to manipulate three working strands of yarn across a purl row? Don’t be afraid of bright and contrasting colors in fair isle. These are not the colors Kim H. dictated in the pattern. In my defense, Yorkshire Tweed 4-Ply is hard to find, having been discontinued, and for all my scrounging in yarn stores I never did come up with two of the shades she calls for. But I rejected the recommended lawn green and peacock blue as too garish for my taste, and that was probably a mistake. I chose eight colors I thought were harmonious, but I’ll bet it doesn’t look to you as if there are eight different colors in these pictures. The mulled wine, chocolate brown, and deep neptune blue are too close in value, and it’s hard to distinguish them unless you look very carefully. And the bone color looks very white in comparison to the darker shades. Lesson learned! I’ll go for more contrast when I start my mittens.

Bramble and Porridge. Mulch and Bracken. Bark and Mushroom. Fox and Mallard. Porridge and Cinnabar. (And two skeins of lichen St. Ives sock yarn I picked up at the same time because I never see this stuff for sale in the US, it’s inexpensive, and Nancy Bush likes it. ‘Nuff said.)

These are my first attempts at combining colors for mittens. After I’d taken this picture and mulled over the topic for several days, I came to the May chapter in The Knitter’s Almanac. Trust Elizabeth Zimmermann to have paved the way: “Color (and you may consider this to apply to the choice of wool for mittens) is a deeply subjective matter; in the tastes of various people it can vary infinitely. . . . Experiment with mittens, and exercise and expand your sense of color with them. Combine unusual colors, and find out if you like the result.” Another choice line: “Salmon-pink I can’t stand perhaps because it used to be the color of so much cheap underwear, but in smoked salmon it’s delicious, and it suits geraniums and zinnias.”

I, too, find I can love some colors in nature, but have no wish to apply them to my clothing. I bought salmon-colored zinnias at the market this morning, but you’ll find nothing that shade in my wardrobe (nor in my underwear drawer, thank you). In yarns, I have a deep affection for tweeds, perhaps because they capture more of the complexity of colors as they occur in nature. It’s the same effect I most admire in the master painters: the ability to see and capture a kaleidoscope of shades the human eye blends into one. Above my desk is a postcard of Vermeer’s Head of a Girl: her ochre robe, on closer examination, contains greens, rust reds, yellows. Some of my favorite paintings are snow scenes by the Impressionists, particularly Monet — that snow is blue, pink, terracotta, dove grey, and yet we see it as white. The heathery Jamieson’s Shetland Spindrift I’ve chosen for most of my mittens is as good an approximation of this color depth as I’ve seen in a yarn. I don’t know how they achieve it, but I think they must not bleach the natural color out of the wool before they dye it.

I have a lot to learn. I’ll be musing on color a lot this fall. Next time I hope to have some samples knitted up so I can experiment with how colors affect each other. In addition to the lot I’ve shown you above, I have some Rowan Yorkshire Tweed 4-Ply for a Fair Isle-inspired beret. After I started hearing laments from Zimmermaniacs eager to replicate Brooklyn Tweed’s gorgeous Seamless Hybrid sweater and unable to find the RYT DK, I realized that world supplies of this great-but-discontinued yarn really are starting to run short. So I hied myself to the LYS and spent at least twenty minutes cross-legged on the floor, playing with different color combinations of their odd balls. The mittens and the beret will be my self-imposed crash course in colorwork, and I’ll want your input on what works and what doesn’t.

Chez Blue Garter we like to keep a lot of irons in the fire. Since I’m leading the Zimmermania charge, I also need to stay on top of my EZ projects. Besides the Fishtrap Aran, which I intend to cast on today, I’ve also started a Baby Surprise jacket for the firstborn of one of my dearest childhood friends. Little Cam is due in just a couple of weeks, so I need to knit fast! And on Tuesday I start two courses at the local university, so I’ll have homework on top of the knitting. I intend to become extremely proficient at knitting while reading.

By the way, it’s never too late to join Zimmermania — just send me an email!

It was chilly in my bedroom this morning. Upstairs here in 1910 Bungalow Land is a “finished attic”, but apparently insulation hasn’t been deemed all that essential to finish construction. My aunt warned us it would be nippy up there during the winter, but I’m the girl who slept with the windows open year round in Maine. And it’s temperate Portland — it’s not like we’re going to be breaking ice on the wash basin or anything. But that tingle in the air the last few mornings means summer is coming to a close, and even the potentiality of a cold house is ample cause to cast on a wool sweater. Yes, I have several in mind for myself, including one of my own design with the yarn begging in the closet. But first I’m going to make a start on Mr. Garter’s Fishtrap cardi.

The swatchcap worked up at an acceptable gauge, so I just need to make a few notes about the math and then I’ll be off to the races. And that means cosying up with Elizabeth Zimmermann and the Knitter’s Almanac before bed tonight. Mr. Garter’s several hundred miles away with our biking friends at Cycle Oregon, hatching some crazy plan to ride about 80 miles uphill tomorrow. But I’ve got my cat (who’s had his tail badly bitten by mean Felix and requires extra cuddling and Amoxicillin for his wounds) and one of the great knitting manuals of all time, so I’m happy as a goat in garbage. Madam Zimmermann’s had a little extra media exposure recently, what with the sock patterns in the latest issue of VK (and I’m dying to knit me some wild colorwork kneesocks). I’ve long admired her fearless attitude, and the more I see of her patterns, the more I marvel at her innovation. Ever seen the Baby Surprise jacket? How exactly did she figure out how to construct that thing? She was a genius, but the best part is that her books make you feel like there’s no earthly reason you couldn’t be, too.

The point I’m coming to is this: it doesn’t matter a bit that EZ’s books were published thirty or forty years ago. I know it will make me a better knitter to follow her advice and attempt some of her patterns. And if I think a garment of hers needs a little style modification here and there, that’s perfectly in keeping with the pioneering spirit she espouses. (As long as I don’t knit it in acrylic.) Jess and I are gung ho to make Fishtrap cardis with zippers. I think a Baby Surprise might be just the thing for a friend’s little one due next month. And there are always those kneesocks… Jess and I are cooking up an EZ knitalong, which we’re calling Zimmermania. So far it’s just the two of us, but we’re friendly and we’d like company. Who’s in? Grab an EZ title, grab your sticks, pick a project (or two or three). If there’s interest, we’ll moderate a Blogger page where you can post your progress. More details to follow in the next few days.

One of my touchstone books during childhood was Sarah, Plain and Tall. Sarah-in-the-story comes from Maine, has a cat named Seal, and says that her favorite colors are blue and green and gray, the colors of the sea. I grew up tall on a rocky coast on the other side of the country, and I always identified with her. If you were to dye a colorway for my island, it would have to be blue and green and gray, and also dry-grass-and-driftwood, like this:

See the Great Blue Heron on the end of the cannery pier? He’s island colors all over. I was out birding with my parents and some other island folk when I took these. The birds were mostly hunkered down to stay out of the rolling fog and damp, which we sometimes get even on sunny late-summer days. The islands are always cooler than the mainland, which makes them good places for knitters of wool.

And speaking of wool…

Surprise! A finished project! It’s a Fishtrap “swatchcap”, as EZ likes to call them. She’s perfectly right, in this as in nearly everything else: why knit a useless square to test your gauge and materials when you could just dash off a hat?

You’ll notice I camouflage pretty well with the dead grass, too. When I lived in New England and New York I found myself filling my closet with deep reds and pumpkin-y oranges, and spring in Portland made me want pale leafy greens. But when I’m home (and San Juan Island will always be home, no matter where I live), I revert to browns and blues and sandy beige. I’ve only just noticed this impulse to adapt to my landscape, and I’m realizing it affects my knitting, too. Has anyone else experienced this sort of color instinct? I’m not sure if it’s a primitive urge to be unobtrusive or a subliminal form of inspiration from the environment, or maybe both.

At any rate, this visit to the island also made me realize how jarring it is when the colors you see aren’t what your mind expects. We had a potluck party at South Beach, and as the sun went down we got this:

It’s the smoke from the forest fires in the Cascades and on Vancouver Island. That mauve sky and the tinge of cerulean in the water are beautiful, but they don’t look like the San Juans at all. And they made the whole landscape look wrong: the greens were too vivid, parts of the sound looked yellow… I felt like we were all on drugs. (Big props to Mr. Garter for the sunset picture, though.)

All this rambling is leading somewhere, I promise. I’ve been thinking a lot about color and how to make more mindful use of it in things I knit. Thus far, I’ve mostly used solids in my garments, or I’ve let variegated yarns dyed by someone else do all the work. But I want to start doing some dying of my own, and I’ll get my chance in October — no sooner did I post my eagerness for the natural plant dyeing class than Abundant Yarn opened up registration! Huzzah! I also want to start learning colorwork. I’m going to practice on mittens, with Nancy Bush’s Estonian patterns as a guide. Choosing colors I like together was harder than I thought it would be, but next time I’ll show you what I’ve come up with.

In the mean time I want to know: what would a colorway of your home turf look like? And I’ll leave you with these darling girls:

That’s our Selkie on the left and then on the right, in Labrador Heaven at the beach with her friend Lucy.