Red

Red is an attention-getter — a glowing stoplight in the dark, a showstealer among a crowd of black dresses, the promise of ripe fruit, the glow of embers in a campfire that emphasize the night. And, sometimes, it’s a big old flag of “do not touch”.

In this case, our friend Virginia Creeper. Some people can touch it. Not me. But I will admit that it’s very very pretty. Of course, so is poison ivy.

Kind of Recursive

But a huge undertaking nonetheless…..

There’s a Christmas Goat that gets put up every year in Gävle, Sweden (sorry for the lack of umlauts over the “a” in Gavle, I haven’t found WordPress’s settings for foreign languages).* This has been going on since 1966, when:

On 2 December the 13-metre (42,6 feet) tall, 7-metre long, 3 tonne goat stood on the square. At the stroke of midnight on New Year’s Eve, the goat went up in smoke. The perpetrator was found and charged with vandalism.

The Gävle Goat has been burned down 22 times since then.

Here is a link to the film of the goat under construction: Goat film.

I’m not sure if putting a giant stack of hay in the middle of town and decorating it with lights doesn’t invite people to see what would happen to it when it went up ablaze. But hearing about this makes me curious about what the rest of the region is like, and whether the town has a plan for what to do if no one burns the thing down for them.  Burning Man is a young (controlled) tradition compared to this.

*Thanks, Naomi. You learn something new every day.

PS3 Fire and Earth Revisited

Rose from a golf course in New Orleans

Butterfly earrings

The first element in Project Spectrum was Fire — orange, red, and pink. February and March, I was knitting on the Sampler Socks (Little Child’s Socks from Nancy Bush, Knitting Vintage Socks). Finished those finally and managed to post about them here on WordTapestry.

I branched out and made some butterfly earrings. The findings were found in a fabric store. Each earring had 1 earhook, 3 headpins, 16 burgundy red seed beads, 6 orange Swarosvki (R) bicones, and 1 fuchsia colored butterfly. Two pairs of needle nose pliers, and I was ready to start making the loops to keep the headpins on the earhook loop. Much chasing of beads in the kitchen later, I had two good tries at earrings. Of course, these earrings aren’t meant to be worn with openwork shawls or beloved sweaters. They catch too much on threads in shirts and necklaces.

I also played with crochet, but the results may end up being someone’s holiday present, so for now, I won’t show you that one. Instead, here’s a rose from a New Orleans golf course, taken in April but definitely part of the element of fire.

The rose also fits in with the second element in Project Spectrum –

Earth. Note: the project I worked on for PS3 were the Amazonian socks and not much else during April and May. I did take photos of lots of flowers and gardens on trips and in the home garden, some of which made it to my flickr account.

Goodbye to The Water Element and PS3

Lake at a National Park

October is the end of Project Spectrum for the year. Yes, I still have projects on the needles (for instance, a certain green pair of socks which is next in the second-sock completion queue). But I’m still very pleased with the results. I’ve used the whole project — from fire and earth to air and water — to motivate me to try different things and to use different media, as well as to jumpstart an ongoing mythology project. Yes, I’ll continue on reading even as PS3 ends.

I made socks (3 pairs and one half a pair), attempted to cast on rusted root for the water element (it’s on hold now), knit with thread, drew the stones of a church, learned to photograph water, made earrings (with pink and orange crystals for the fire element), tried out Cat Bhordhi’s sock book, and finished lots of projects.

The light and shadows are beautiful this time of year

If Lolly holds Project Spectrum next year, I’m hoping my contribution will be less about texture and one skein of yarn (admittedly multi-dyed, but the yarn did most of the work) and more about purpose-driven color play. Maybe a lovely Fair Isle sweater with multiple colors of the rainbow. Or some project that captures the mood of the shadows in a doorway on an Autumn day.

In the meantime, I’ve joined Socktoberfest because I’m enjoying the extra boost to my creativity that PS3 gave to me. Maybe I’ll finish up some of those sock projects. I’m also thinking about casting on for Rusted Root soon. Just because I didn’t get to it during the timeline for PS3 doesn’t mean I don’t want to knit it.

My brain keeps singing the song “Wake Me Up When September Ends,” more from the depressing weekend weather we’ve had than any other reason. In future posts, I may revisit some of the projects I worked on for PS3, showing the items that were made long before WordTapestry was born. Hopefully, tomorrow will be a good day for photography — the tidal socks should be ready for a final close-up then.

Thanks, Lolly, for all the fun and challenge!

A Tale of Two Tootsies

Here is a progress shot of the pair of Sampler Socks (Nancy Bush’s Little Child Socks). If you use the tag search, you’ll see a glam photo of the first sock in progress. I have second sock syndrome, possibly spurred on by promptly falling down a Ravelry rabbit hole — queuing projects. The stats say I began this pair in December of last year. How embarrassing.

However, this second sock has been a very bad one. At one stage, when knitting without glasses, I managed to remove one of the knitting needles holding live stitches instead of picking out the actual new needle. Knitters will understand that moment of “doh”.

For non-knitters, what this looks like are a lot of little tiny loops that are trying to descend back into the knitting and cause runners. Go cut up an old sock and look at how it has loops holding everything together. Then try to figure out how to capture the loops without an extra set of hands. We’ll wait.

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Waiting…..

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Not pretty, eh?

Finally I’m nearing the point on the second sock where the toe decreases start. It’s a sweet little project, with cute patterning, a nice mix of stockinette with other stitches, and a really lovely choice of yarn (Lorna’s Laces). It’s my first sock project with a “seam” stitch in the back, and decreases at the leg around this purl stitch. (And it’s also my project for the “Fire” element for Project Spectrum… oh, a late one this is!)