Red squares

I am not a saleswoman by inclination, so when I was forced to become one while selling my house, I had to have a stress mitigation strategy. My strategy was to knit something that required concentration, was rewarding (a pattern you could watch grow) and have some sort of artistic content to make up for lack.of painting and music while I was property obsessed.

I made a jumper using a Kaffe Fasset pattern of squares. You can mix colours at will (the artistic content) , you can watch it growing as you begin new colours, and you have to concentrate, but not too much.

I used wool from various past projects in red and brown. I already had the sleeves from a half unpicked jumper my mother had knitted. Brown wool was unavailable locally, so I dyed some. Orange wool was easy to dye brown but the greens and blues came out of the dye pot as greys and muted moss colour (which I saved for the next project).

As the open houses progressed, my jumper grew and on the day the house sold four weeks into the sales campaign, the jumper was finished. I didn't put it on until the deal was sealed in case I tempted the gods and my buyer backed out.

I have been wearing it ever since as it is warm and comfortable. And it matches my red jeans.

Orange, red, brown ...

Gladioli from the garden, orange as orange can be.

The very last of the orange, very orange, Gladioli are in a vase and Sydney is suddenly cold and windy. After an unseasonably warm May, the cold change is making us all shiver and reach for the winter woollies.

To celebrate the start of winter I am reknitting an old jumper, making the front a sea of squares. I wanted some brown wool to mix with the red, rust and orange but brown is out of fashion and hard to find. So I put various odd balls of green, orange and purple wool in a pot of dark brown dye. Out came grey, green, dark grey, dark purple and one ball of mottly brown, mottly because I didn't stir the pot often enough.

Orange, red, brown, pink....

Textile art: knitting a fox cub in winter (2)

When the eight year old (previous post) announced she wanted a fox cub and her mother on the front of the partly knitted jumper I was making, I searched for some quad ruled paper to draw the foxes on and bought skeins of dark blue and dark green wool since the foxes had to be 'just like in the book' .

The picture of fax and cub chosen as motive

Mother fox on Quad ruled paper

Today I sewed the finished jumper together.

Front

Back

As the foxes emerged I showed them to the eight year old - she thinks they are wonderful. Phew...

Textile art: Knitting a fox-cub in winter

I am knitting a jumper for an eight year old with colours she said she liked ... mainly blues and pinks.  

I get a bit bored with plain knitting (thus the ad-lib colours) so when I was a good way up the back, I asked her if she would like an animal picture on the front, perhaps a dinosaur?

She thought a while then said 'I know!' and hurried off to find the book with the picture she was thinking of.  It took a while to find, but she knew exactly what she was looking for and eventually emerged triumphant from her overloaded bookshelves.

'There!' she announced showing the picture. 'I'd like the mother and the cub please. And the snowflakes!'

'Hmmm,' I said, thinking of the half-completed back. 'Can I change the colours a bit?'

'No,' she said, 'it should be exactly these colours!'

Picture from Cub's First Winter by Rebecca Elliott

Children are as absorbent as sponges and very impressionable. I thought it fascinating that this picture book has had such an influence on a child (who is now reading the hobbit) that she wants the mother and cub motive on her jumper.

To be continued ....

Multi-tasking with Siegfried and Parsifal

ABC Classic FM is playing the Ring Cycle this week, courtesy of Bayerische Rundfunk (Bayern Radio) which announces each evening in three languages. Tonight is night three and Siegfried is singing his heart out. He has just discovered the wood bird as I write. The music under the direction of Kyril Petrenko is fantastic and well paced. No wonder the Berlin Philharmonic chose him as their next music director. He takes over from Simon Rattle and I think he will be equally successful. Lucky Berlin Philharmonic.

Next week I will be traveling and as I listen to Siegfried I am transferring some opera DVDs to a microSD card to take with me and watch on the way. It takes a while as you have to reformat them. First I tried transferring direct but the only one that worked was a Bolshoi recording of Tchaikovsky's Queens of Spades. Copyright protection was the problem with the others so I had to search around the internet to find a way to fix that and now my computer is working hard with the transfer. (Bravo Bolshoi on making their work accessible!)

Currently DVD#2 of Parsifal is being transferred and as Siegfried and the wood bird sing to each other I watch to make sure the computer doesn't turn itself off mid-transfer. I am knitting as I watch.

Surely that is multi-tasking?  I read that you can only do one thing really well when you multi-task, and for me that is currently listening to Siegfried. Everything else is on automatic.