Thank you all so very much for your kind words and fervent kitty-go-home wishes. There’s been no sign of the little stinker yet, but your support means a lot to me and it was comforting to read your comments the last few days. Mr. Garter is home now, which is awfully nice. Apparently I would have had fodder for ten more posts about TDWTBL and his kinfolk if I’d been on this trip (including stories about my darling unsupervised husband three sheets to the wind on SoCo and Jaeger bombs… he’s such a babe in the woods about alcohol), but I don’t think I’d have been able to enjoy myself knowing the cat was lost and I might be missing opportunities to find him. And anyway, this is a knitting blog, despite recent evidence to the contrary.

So let’s see some knitting!

Yep, it’s another Chevron Scarf. Yawn, I know. But I started this darn thing two full years ago. Then it was a basic feather-and-fan scarf in two colors of Koigu, with reference to no pattern at all — this is the second time I’ve inadvertently ripped off a Last-Minute Knitted Gifts pattern, the first being a hat for myself that’s a dead ringer for the cute baby hat with the i-cord bow. I swear to you on Pride and Prejudice that I had never yet seen the book when I began either project. Anyway, it’s really Miss Domesticat who deserves the credit for this scarf being finished at all – I was so taken with her edgier, zaggier version that I ripped out my ten inches of feather-and-fan and began again immediately. This time it was a quick knit, and I gave it a no-nonsense blocking to open up the holes and make it look a little more delicate. And are those wee beads you spy in the photo above? Indeed they are!

I got those little guys as a free giftie from Earthfaire almost two years ago when I ordered sock yarn from them. They’ve been waiting for the opportunity to adorn something, and their colors were perfect with this scarf (which is really a little more green than it looks in these photos… #1 is most accurate).

The extra gussy-uppedness seemed appropriate on a present for my mother-in-law’s 60th. I’m happy to report she’s delighted with her new scarf. I made her a little silk one the first Christmas I knew how to knit, and she’s worn it so often that it’s starting to look a little pilly and sad, so it was high time to bring another into the rotation.

I have more to show you, so hold me to my word to post at least three times this week: Glee is waiting damply in the wings, and I have rather thrilling news to break tomorrow!

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.

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.

This poor scarf. I finished her ages ago during the roadtrip, but she never got her due on the blog because I never got around to blocking her so she’d look her best.

And now I’m doing her the disservice of displaying these crummy pictures that don’t show her colors at all. Poor leaf lace scarf, she looks like warmed-over cat throw-up. In reality this yarn is lovely shades of soft pinky-beige and lavender, like this:

I will find a way to capture these colors in the scarf, I will. But Mr. Garter has scampered off to Texas and he took the camera with him. He left me the little Powershot S110, but somehow I’m doubting it’s up to the task. He’s not back for a week, so we’ll have to have some dull photo-less posts…although I’ve got one or two things up my sleeve that I prepared in advance. Anyway, I hearby promise a better photo shoot for Lady Leaf Lace.

Yesterday I started making my stash a temporary home that isn’t in the garage. I don’t want to unpack everything yet because I hope it will be moving over to my aunt’s house in a couple of months. Yes, we’ve decided to try to go for it, if we can work out a mortgage that isn’t too crippling. But I did go digging through my yarn boxes and started working up a little sump’n sump’n for Baby Sassy. If all goes well and I don’t ruin it when I try to crochet some edging, I’ll post the pattern here. Stay tuned! Now I’m off to open the last box and see if I can’t find poor neglected Rosalind.