Moth Heaven

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A Not So Wee Sheep Thing

This has been a wonderful week for me.

I've been busy with the Newburyport Chamber Music Festival. My family hosts musicians for the week, and so we've been cooking for double the usual number, moving chairs from venue to venue, drinking wine and swapping stories late into the many nights, and witnessing the most amazing music happening right in front of us, sometimes right in my own living room.

As the dust settles, I can also say that this week was extra special for me because my Welcome to the Flock sweater was number one for awhile on Ravelry's Hot Right Now page. Entirely thanks to the influence of The Yarn Harlot's pending neice or nephew, her knitters found my little pattern out, and goodness but what a lot of happy a sheep sweater can bring to a bunch of knitters. I'm especially delighted because this pattern was something I wrote for my friend Brooke's gorgeous SIncere Sheep yarn, so I feel like the sweater already had good kharma.

image thanks to Bristol Ivy

So this is a welcome, especially if you're looking me up for the first time to see what this sheep chick is all about. This is also a great big enormous thank you if you bought or even queued the pattern. Know that I already made a donation to Stephanie's favorite charity as a thank you for the attention she sent me, and also know that I hope you enjoy knitting the sheep. There's a kind of a KAL thread over on Ravelry for questions if you have them, and hopefully there will be a lot of lovely little people in warm sheepie sweaters this winter, and for winters to come.

Knitters are awesome. That is all.

 

 

 

What Color Goes With Rust?

 

In and around all the deadline knitting, I’ve managed to finish one more version of Hiro, this time in an autumnal palette of straw, rust, gold, and green.

Ever since my roommate in college told me I “am” an Autumn and should therefore only wear earthy colors, I have defaulted to them almost out of a kind of superstition, as much as I am drawn to brighter hues like purple and fuschia. I did indulge that part of my reptilian brain with the Mad Color version I knit, using colors with names like Black Cherry & Bloody Hell, and I do wear it a lot, almost always with jeans. But my ruddy coloring happens to look nice with the colors you might find on a forest floor.

image borrowed from here

I’m not necessarily drawn to rust, it’s not the first color that sings to me when I look at a booth’s worth of pretty at a fiber festival. But rust has grown on me over the years (that's true in a few ways), and I have become somewhat of a specialist in the good rusts among my several indie dyer friends (a subject for a later post, perhaps?). I almost always immediately want the purple, or the sea green. But rust — I know — is always going to look better with my hair. So that’s where I started out with this particular sweater.

 

Here’s a little color theory to explain why this combination works. Let's go back to the color wheel:

from tiger color

Remembering that pleasing color combinations are all about solid relationships, let's break down how the color choices in this sweater relate to each other. On the most basic level, this is an orange, yellow and green sweater, all of which you can see are neighbors on the right side of this color wheel, between 1 and 6 o'clock.

I began with knowing I wanted rust in there somewhere. It's not hard to see that rust is actually a version of orange. Technically it’s a "shade", or a dark orange. My rust is somewhere in the middle here in this representation of orange shades, halfway between the pure orange from the basic wheel above, and black.

borrowed from jwd publishing blog

Yellow and orange are neighbors on the color wheel, also known as analogous colors, so their related shades are also close kin.

The gold I chose to go with the rust is also a shade, but this time it’s a kind of slightly dark yellow. My gold is about a third of the way over from pure yellow on the left. I also want to point out here how shades of yellow start to become olive as they get darker. Neat, huh?

also borrowed from jwd

And farther around the color semi-circle just past yellow is green. The particular green here is a yellowish green, somewhere near the middle on this tint scale:

ganked this from somwehere on tumblr

You might also like to know that the main color of the body, that nice straw color — looking kinda flat beige on my computer monitor — in real life looks a lot like the last discernable block on the right of this scale.

What gets a little complicated is the difference between darker versions of a color (shades) and lighter versions of a color (tints), and whether or not there is any grey factor (or tone) in these particular choices, but you can boil all of it down to balance. We have two darker yarns, and two lighter yarns, and they balance each other out in a really pretty way. If some of these terms make you dizzy, there's a nice little color glossary here, or you could pick up something for your bookshelf like Deb Menz's Color Works.

In conclusion, this sweater combines values of orange, yellow, and green, which means that we have an analogous trilogy here, always a safe bet in choosing colors.

Now I doubt many people choose colors the geeky way I do, but using a color wheel always helps me make that last decision. I usually get a couple of yarns together and wonder where to go next. By looking at a color wheel at that point, I get nudged in a good direction. I may not follow the strict rules, but I feel comfortable using it as a tool to at least narrow (or understand) my choices.

 

other idea on choosing colors for Hiro can be found here, and here.

Fiber Revival Perfection

The Forecast: dry, sunny, mid 80's, not much wind.

The Vendors: 11 of my favorites from near and slightly far (Lisbon, Maine is totally driveable on one cup of coffee -- that's how I measure distance these days).

The Alpacas: AWESOME!!!!

arriving in style

The People: over 500 came through the gate, to knit,

to spin

a Jensen 30" came out to play

to watch Vintage Baseball,

note the spindle in hand

not the Russian Spindle class, but close

to buy a beer, and or a skein of yarn and a bump of fiber. There was chat,

and laughter, new skills here and there.

Lots of happy faces all over the place. In short, perfection.

Thanks to one and all, it was a fantastic day.

 

Bring a Chair! Fiber Revival is August 10th

A little reminder that Fiber Revival is going to be held in Newbury, MA on August 10th this year. It’s almost exactly halfway to SPA, so if you’re jones-ing for a little hangout, come on down! Check out the website for details on directions, and for the couple of classes we offer, and feast your credit card on this list of vendors:

• Enchanted Knoll Farm
• Hair of the Dog
• Leslie Wind
• Mad Color Fiber Arts
• Pinestar Studio
• Spunky Eclectic
• Stitched by Jessalu
• The Merlin Tree
• The Woolen Rabbit
• The Yarn and Fiber Company
• Wildest Dreams Alpaca Farm

Also, we are family friendly, with Vintage Baseball going on, lunch and coffee for sale, and a fabulous beer truck from the Ipswich Ale Brewing Company.

Don’t forget to bring a chair!