Monday, February 16, 2009

My Horizon Becomes Broadened

I'd been happily making wash and wear blankets with my acrylic for some decades when a friend popped out of nowhere with a bag of yarns for me. I took it happily, not knowing where this would lead. Yarn addiction is a serious thing, and I was being lead in a dangerous direction indeed. But I didn't know that at the time. I was an innocent in the ways of the yarncrafters.

To make matters worse, the friend with the stash was Barbara Grossman, founder and director of the Pittsburgh Knit and Crochet Festival. The first one of these festivals was five years ago, and I attended in a working capacity. I was on the board of directors for The Midwife Center for Birth and Women's Health www.MidwifeCenter.org and we were selling snacks and lunches as a fundraiser at the festival. Most of my day was spent behind the food counter, but I did wedge myself into the crowds to look around a bit. There were vendors selling an astounding collection of pretty things that were rather overwhelming to me. There was a dazzling array of classes in subjects that were completely foreign to me. My limited experience, self taught as I was, had ill prepared me for this environment. It was just as well. The first festival was so jam packed with attendees that one could barely insinuate oneself through the throngs.

But back to that stash. There was some yarn that had a metallic thread through it. Since this was a stash, there were no labels, so I had no chance of finding that particular one again. I set out to find something at least similar. What Was I Thinking??? My first searches were online, and I began to taste some of what is out there. Wool, linen, alpaca, merino, cotton, silk, bamboo, mohair, soy (!), angora, cashmere, et cetera an nat. I could and did search for yarn with metallic content. I could and did search for machine washable.

And I found far more than I ever bargained for. But that is for the next blog entry. For now, a suitable yarn was found. There was not nearly enough of it to make a blanket, but it could accent one nicely. Here began a collaboration. I make the patterns and designs using Excel, and Christina is my color consultant. She, being an architect, has more sense of color than I do. Chris had in mind something with an overall unity of design. It was a foreign idea to me, but what could it cost to humor her? She grouped colors together, and this is what came out. I was almost shocked by how well it worked.

Now, I ask for color consult on a regular basis. A huge resource had been right under my nose, and I hadn't known it.

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