I once snagged quite a few pounds of an undyed light brown cashmere at $15/lb from a wholesaler I knew. The catch was that it was extremely thin and single-ply and too fragile to knit up even as lace; it had to be plied on a spinning wheel. Well, guess what I have. Hey. Ply, dye, felt the hanks with some merino, perhaps, for a little extra strength–I can manage all that.
I have made three afghans with it so far. My mother knitted some into an exceedingly elegant aran sweater. And I have five pounds, half of it dyed into all these colors (we are still working on the camera thing), all waiting to be made up into the next afghan; I’m picturing a windowpane quilting pattern or some such, the undyed skeins framing the blocks of color.
But it’s been sitting in the closet, ready to go, for several years. I’ve been thinking lately that I’m going to Stitches in a couple of weeks, that the new stuff tends to push the old stash further back in the lineup, and I’d really like to see this yarn finally grow up. So. I pulled it out and looked it over.
It stopped me, just like it has every time since I dyed it. Some of the colors came out brighter than the others. Swatch swatch swatch, and yet, I don’t believe I can really know how they’ll all play together as a whole until I’ve gotten a piece done that’s way bigger than a swatch. If it were an even balance of bright and subdued, but it’s not. It’s odd; I mean, they’re all overdyed on top of this same light brown, you’d think…
So the past few days, I’ve been thinking: my hearing loss makes it so I don’t hear some things, but, I notice things that other people sometimes miss, because they’re too busy hearing the whole words while I’m focusing on the nonverbal aspects of the conversation. So. I wonder… I have a friend a few blocks away whose husband is colorblind. The walls in her family room are yellow. I wonder, if I took that stack of balls over to them, if he could tell me better than I can see how the color tones/values mesh? Since he’s missing the distraction of the reds and greens, akin to the consonants I tend to miss. I wonder if it would be clearer to me myself, if I put them in the context of the yellow walls? Or if I put it on top of her white grand piano with the white living room walls as a backdrop and looked across at them rather than down. Curious.