raining color

It began simply enough.

Some worn spots in the right cuff of a beloved sweater were turning into actual holes and needed to be mended before they grew any larger.¹

Having raveled and re-knit this cuff before I wasn’t worried about doing it again. This time I’d have to take it further back to get to the strong yarn, but with newer brown handspun to replace the unusable bits and a little spit-splicing, it wouldn’t take long to rebuild.²

At least it wouldn’t have taken long if that’s what I’d chosen to do. But the left cuff was patched (I’d been giving my hands a knitting sabbatical at the time), so it seemed sensible to do the same thing with the right. Patching is quick, easy, strong, and convenient—if not so elegant as re-knitting. And the sweater would then be balanced (after a fashion).

Plus, I have no shortage of swatches.

No shortage?

HA!

Understatement of the year.

I am the old woman who lives in a shoe who has so many swatches she doesn’t know what to do.

Not that I don’t love them all.

It’s just that all is a lot—especially all at once. In a pile. On my workbench.

For not only is the pile made up of a ridiculous amount of color and pattern (as Beryl points out), but these swatches are also the yarn-centric equivalent of an overstuffed box of photos—physical manifestations of shearing days and spinning choices, of pattern development, article writing, whacky experiments, and the thrill of being on the cover of Interweave Knits. Here my son aged four with chicken pox—and me by his side exploring color and cable with CVM yarn, pausing to rub magic potions into his skin. There is my mother sighing over endless games of solitaire while I churn through stacks of knitting graph paper, drawing and re-drawing for a design commission.³ And look at my husband Dan choosing colors for yet another sweater he doesn’t really want but which I insist on making for him. So much!

Not that I don’t take a certain kind of pleasure from a romp down memory lane. But en masse it’s a bit exhausting.

So how to cope with overwhelm?⁴

Well the easy answer (and the thing I’ve done untold times before), is to grab the swatches I need, stuff the rest back into the bags, and tuck the complicated hoard out of sight once again. But this time it felt wrong, so I paused. Did I really want to do the same old thing? What other options were there?

The most obvious was the one I chose twelve Thanksgivings ago when I stitched more than three pounds of the things into a random patchwork blanket.⁵ It only took a few days and the stockpile of swatches was cut almost in half. I also ended up with a single swath of cloth that is warm, evocative, manageable, satisfying and useful.

The blanket, however, is so color, pattern and memory-rich that even as I sleep under it from October through May I cover it with an old (and very plain) quilt to prevent vertigo.⁶ So while stitching together the rest of the collection would solve the swatch-stash problem, I’m overwhelmed by the idea of either making or having another such mash-mash of history and pattern—especially when there are enticing, peaceful, mono-chromatic and undemanding materials right here at hand…

So maybe I’ll just grab one of those bags and put—-

NO!!

Time (as that attractive saying goes), to shit or get off the pot.⁷

But hooooowwwwwwww??????

Luckily, the swatches themselves had an idea..

Because somewhere in the midst of the “oh my goodness I can’t decide,” and “this is too much to deal with right now,” in flew the image of a color/value study— and suddenly I knew how to begin.⁸

So off we went.

All it took to begin was an old white sheet thrown across the guest bed and a commitment to try to meander in there once a day (as the mood strikes). And now I must wait and see if, in time and rather like a jig saw puzzle, the pieces will start to settle into some kind of order of their own accord.⁹

They are not there yet, but this part isn’t too bad—at any rate it’s more compelling than stuffing them back into the trunk to languish for another decade. And though I’d prefer to have this project finished than be smack dab in the middle of it, at the moment the process is engaging enough to keep me going.¹⁰

And now that I’ve shared it with you, something will happen. I’m sure of it.

Luckily, in the meantime, there is this.

And this.

1. Knit sometime around the turn of this century (how strange to use that phrase), it’s an oversized pullover of 3 ply naturally brown Cormo from Wolf Point Montana. The exact date is fuzzy but I do remember knitting it in the amazing Maggie Casey’s back yard in Boulder Colorado when I was there to teach How To Weave A Bag On A Box. And since the first version of the instructions were published in Spin Off Magazine in 1997, it must have been shortly after that.

Why the timing matters I don’t know except to be delighted that it is still a favorite garment and in excellent shape (cuff mending notwithstanding), even after all the wearing for all these years.

2. spit-splicing

3. My mother was hugely relieved when my then ten year old son made a brilliant suggestion about my design, solved the conundrum, and we all went for a long walk.

Many of those swatches turned into published patterns (some still available on Ravelry). Many never made it beyond the idea phrase. Many became sweaters I’ve given away. And many are still regular parts of my wardrobe. No wonder my hands get a little weary now and again!

4. I drew myself “swimming in a sea of swatches” because “in the sea,” was the prompt for October fifth in Anna Brones’ October list of prompts, which I’ve added to my daily diary drawing practice this month. It’s still all about me ‘n Beryl (apparently that’s all I can draw), but it’s been compelling to render us doing the same old things in new and unexpected ways. I highly recommend Anna’s Creative Fuel Substack at all times, and this is a nice way to dip your toe in, as there are still many days and enticing prompts in the month.

And because I can’t resist one more digression, here is a link to Caroline Ross’ latest post To Keep The Wolf From The Door. Not only is it a fascinating list of reasons why she writes, but it also has many footnotes in one of which (#8), she links to a post by Rosie Whinray called In Praise of Digressive Writing. And who could resist a title like that?

5. The saved-swatches-sewn-into-a-blanket idea came from one of Kaffe Fassett’s books —Glorious Knits or Glorious Color I can’t remember which. It was in the late 1980s at any rate, and I remember seizing upon this idea with delight and promising myself to both knit and to save swatches from then on. And so I did. Until… I didn’t. In retrospect it is interesting to note that Fassett eventually moved into patchwork— a medium that is all about sewing small patterned bits of cloth into large pattern swaths.

6. And these days the extra cover is also essential to keep the blanket from becoming completely impregnated with dog hair—though those show up anyway as you can see in the photo :-)

7. This has, for whatever reason, been a week of emptying, painting, reorganizing and thinning the contents of a couple of cupboards—and apparently the process is catching for even as I was in the midst I read that Sandi Rosner has been doing much the same thing with her yarn stash. Or at least thinking about it.

Is it in the air? The stars? Are you suddenly feeling compelled to organize, sort, deal with or discard?

8. And I have a thing about value, as many of you know—or at least I used to, back when I worked with lots of color and drew enormous graphite cartoons on massive pieces of paper for all my tapestries

9. What I really hope is that the color pixies will come in the night and do it for me— if not out of kindness (though that would be nice), then maybe out of color mish-mash irritation. No luck so far though. Maybe I have to leave out little plates of cookies and thimbles of good whiskey?

10. I did promise myself that I don’t HAVE to sew them together, but also that they are not going back in those bags, so time will tell how things ultimately unfold—and if it takes the arrival of a guest for me to truly take action.

Arrangement, as you can see, is not my forté (I like having done it more than doing it), but my dear friend Vicki is a genius at organizing many things: businesses, spread sheets, organizations, houses and she is particularly good at color and pattern. So for those who are similarly blessed and might have times when a little soothing, portable color organization could be helpful, she recommends two apps: I Love Hue and I Love Hue Too—both available (I’m pretty sure anyway) for both Android and Apple devices.