This Post is Not on My To Do List

I'm not supposed to be writing this post.  I also wasn't supposed to spend the first 3.5 hours of my morning poking around the computer and taking pictures of my knitting and spinning and I definitely wasn't supposed to join a blog week.  I was supposed to shuffle my kids off to school and spend the first hour of my personal day plying six bobbins of yarn and then I was supposed to reluctantly transition into my work day, which I would spend alternating between the diligent pursuit of a finished work product and the secret rebellion of playing Angry Birds instead of working.  

It wasn't supposed to snow, either, but it did and are we really surprised that this bizarre winter was going to depart without defying expectations one last time? Now it's a snow day here, even though we are a solid month into spring, and everyone with kids knows that a snow day exerts a mysterious power that wreaks havoc with all prior plans. 

Want proof of the snow?  Take a look:

That's the new barn as it looked this morning when I walked the dog (before that sheet of snow on the roof slid off in a single mass and landed in a heap on the ground).

Here is the chicken coop.  The chickens, as always, were surprised by the snow.

They will be even more surprised (again and again and again) when the blanket of snow/slush that is stuck in their overhead netting starts to fall through the netting one large, wet clump after another.

Unfortunately for my snow deprived children, there will not be enough snow to sled or even play in.  It's mostly poorly disguised slush and not at all fun to be out in.  So this winter still ranks as an abject failure on their Entertaining Weather Scale.

Just in time for this colorless day is the first topic for the Third Annual Knitting and Crochet Blog Week.  Much to your delight, I have decided to take part in this and I will be spending this week responding to the prompts given at eskimimimakes.com.  Here is the jiggy for today:

Colour is one of our greatest expressions of ourselves when we choose to knit or crochet, so how do you choose what colours you buy and crochet or knit with. Have a look through your stash and see if there is a predominance of one colour. Do the same with your finished projects - do they match? Do you love a rainbow of bright hues, or more subdued tones. How much attention do you pay to the original colour that a garment is knit in when you see a pattern? Tell readers about your love or confusion over colour.

Well, let's see.  Here is a collage of my most recent yarn, either purchased, spun, or knit.

Color choices for me are largely visceral.  I'm lured to intense colors much more than to pastels.  I definitely prefer blues, reds and pinks and the more, the better.  I almost never choose solids.  Even where something I am knitting (like colorwork) really calls for the sharp contrast that solids can provide, I'm much more likely to choose heathered yarns than true solids.  I understand that the final product will show lots of color interest and I love looking at pictures of colorwork done with solids, but I can't stand looking at the solid colors themselves, so they don't make it into my shopping cart unless I'm shopping for a very particular project and I'm being very disciplined.

I am not at all scientific when I choose a "palette" of colors for a project (I can't even call it a palette without using the snarky quotation marks--I'm just not artistic enough for the idea of a "palette" in my "work" to be taken seriously).  I start off meaning to make intelligent color selections, but after a while I get muddled and decide to just knit the damn thing and hope for the best. Even though I spent a lot of years pulling together multiple colors and fabrics for my quilts,  I am not adept at visualizing multi-color combinations, which means that I'm usually surprised by the end products of multicolor rovings spun and plied into yarn or by the overall look of a project like the sleeve of my Serape sweater (row two, extreme left pic), even  when it comes from a yarn combo (row two, pic 3) that I can see perfectly well (I even know to weight the appearance of the yarn pile so the colors are represented in the same proportions that they'll be used in for the project, and I'm still surprised).

Here, of course, is my Nemesis:

Brown. In the right shade (I like to think of it as chocolate, naturally) it's not a bad color for me to wear, but I'm not sure I could knit with it for very long before I started to resent its brown-ness. This is too bad because I have about 5 pounds of hand processed (by me--I'm kind of invested in this pile of fluff) brown fleece that I intend to spin this summer and knit into an extra large sweater for El Husbando. My feelings about brown* are one of the reasons that I have no clue what to do with the skein of yarn pictured above. The little booger (little nothing, that's 600 yards of worsted weight alpaca) just doesn't speak to me, mostly because it is so very . . . brown.

I'm sure I have more to say about color, but if I don't do some work soon, I'll get in trouble with somebody, though I'm not sure who.  Off we go!

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*Also, I went to Cornell.  The school colors are red and white and when we used to play against Brown--where the uniforms are a very poor advertisement for the color-- we poured all of our intelligence and maturity into cheering "Our team is red hot! Our team is red hot! Your team is brown. Your team is brown."  This kind of training definitely influences a person's attitude towards color.