Moth Heaven

Interlude:

The flowers are full of bees late in the day when the sun dips low in the sky.

 

 

The bees are frantic for twilight nectar, and the whole raft of flowers vibrates with their work.

 

 

I sit in the shade nearby, knitting.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Color Thoughts on Hiro

The inspiration for Hiro came from a simple black to white gradient. The easiest is sometimes the most beautiful, especially if you are rather partial to one color.

 

I like the idea of choosing colors based on what makes your eye happy -- just winging it -- but not everyone is confident of their choices. The Color Collective blog is a brilliant resource for teasing out what makes a combination work. You could browse her posts for hours, admiring her dissection of all the pretty pictures, but mostly, you can look at the colors and get excited about putting them together in a sweater.

 

I love these colors together. They remind me of vintage Baskin-Robbins signage, and I loved Baskin-Robbins as a kid (their brand identity materials are gawd awful these days, I won't link to them to save you from the eye searing uggly of it all). But I might not be able to get them in a single yarn line. No worries, I have other ideas too.

There are many places in books and on the web that offer insight into choosing colors that go together in a pleasing way. It all boils down to relationships, how colors relate to each other on the spectrum. Even though the eye knows best, there are almost always clinical explanations for why you find something pretty. In the case of color, the shorthand for this explanation can be found in the color wheel (borrowed from here):

 

Without getting into the knitty gritty of color theory (let's just say that there are lots of people with much more road under their tires on this subject that there is under mine), I'll offer a few tips here, and you can explore on your own, and certainly ask me in an email if you need advice or reassurance. You can also refresh the basics with a good google search on color theory, or you can start someplace like this.

It's a good way to start, if you feel helpless about choosing colors yourself, to settle on your favorite color and use it as a guide for finding other colors, based on their relationship to your favorite on the color wheel. Say you love purple.

Neighboring colors, also know as analogous colors, are a nice direction as you can see on the left. These work well because they are close to each other on the color wheel and related to each other because of their proximity. And on the right I have a set that is based on the primary colors of red, blue and yellow. In this case, I have purple and orange, both secondaries of red, and yellow, which is the complement of purple, making a nice visual balance as far as the wheel goes.

 

 

I could get into split complementaries and the like here, but you get the idea. I could look for balance or proximity to explain why I like something, but I do consult the wheel if I have two colors I love, and can't settle on a third or a fourth choice. I have tended to choose two pairs in my color selections so far, each pair analogous with each other, and either analogous or complementary of the other pair. Two different purples (wine purple and hot violet pink) with two different reds (red and red orange) in the original Hiro make it a wholly analogous color family choice.

 

The colors I chose for Hiro Petite are more complementary, spread even out around the wheel from each other: yellow, pink, and green:

 

 

The other thing that feels important to me about colors for this sweater is that they should all have about the same intensity, or tone as they say in color theory. Which isn't to say that a pastel blue wouldn't be beautiful next to a chocolate brown, but it would probably be prettier to me were the blue a little more intense, like a turquoise or a Carribean blue. But that may be just me.

Remember that I am just offering this as a clinical explanation, and you may not find this works in real life when you're standing in the yarn store or in front of your stash piled on the guest bed. Above all, trust what you like, swatch if you feel insecure, and email or Rav message me if you have any question. Meanwhile, I have posted on Ravelry a bunch of swatches for both sweaters that I made using the excel skills I learned froml Marnie's excellent tutorial. Feel free to consider them as a starting point in your own exploration.

I'll leave you with this: I happen to like these combinations for a more earthy take on this wild color party, and I can't find most of these colors on your garden variety color wheel. How crazy is that?

Mini-Me, Hiro Edition

My grown up sweater, Hiro, is easy to imagine on a child, as many people observed the week after I released it.

"Oh, that would be so great on my Sophie!"

"I wish there was a kid's version for my twins"

and so on. It didn't take much of a push to get me to write up a pattern for anyone interested in making one for the small person of their choice.

Hiro Petite is available as a Ravelry download, for chest measurements from 23" to 33", or ages 4 to 14, depending on how you think of those sorts of things. Knit in Mad Color superwash Indulgence, there is A-Line shaping for girls, and a straight up and down body for boys. It features three colors instead of the four in the adult sizes because of the limitations of kid-sized shoulders, but you can have a whole lot of colorful fun with three colors.

I'll be doing a post on how to choose colors for both sweaters this week, in case you might be interested.

 

A Sweater for Fall

Believe it or not it's August, when a knitter's fancy turns to thoughts of autumn, and wool. Even though it's sweltering here in Massachusetts, I thought it was a good time to share my next sweater, Hiro.

 

 

I had this idea in my head for awhile, having been knocked sideways about two years ago by a beautiful fabric that covered a chair by the Swedish design firm, Little Red Stuga. I wanted to add colors to the orginal black and white, so I messed with some graph paper and the algebraic interface of pattern repeats and neck openings, and finally knit the pullover prototype last winter in stash yarn.

 

When I saw the Mad Color Fiber Arts booth at the NETA SPA in February, I knew I had to make a cardigan out of it in Heather's amazing crayon colors. Knit in her Superwash Indulgence, I used Black Cherry for the body, and Bloody Hell, Pink Tourmaline, and Ginger for the yoke. She has so many lovely saturated colors, I would love to see it in blues and greens, or a gradation from red to yellow. Or naturals, dark brown to white, or the other way around. What really excites me about offering the pattern for sale is the potential for play with color. I can't knit them all myself, but I know there will be some knockout versions to come. If you want to try some of your own, the pattern is for sale on Ravelry. It includes instructions for both the cardigan and a pullover, and has graded charts according to size, from a 34" to a 60" bust.

 

Caro Sheridan took the great photos, of course. She has a Craftsy course these days, sharing some of her photography secrets. She's one of the best of the teachers over there, natural and fun on camera just like she is in real life. If you're interested at all in improving your photography, Caro's on-line class is a terrific resource.

And here is an explanation for anyone interested in the name of the sweater. As you may have figured out by now, I gravitate towards names of characters I've enjoyed from reading, movies, and television. Hiro Protagonist is the narrator of Neal Stephenson's Snowcrash, a polyglot of a science fiction novel I recommend often to anyone who has not yet discovered it. While a sweater may not seem a likely expression of science fiction ideas, the way the colors interlace in the yoke strikes me as digital, like the "snowcrash"  of a blank computer screen, and I went from there. Now go dream of colors, and electric sheep.