KNITTING A GARDEN

This time of year, I love to knit a garden. All I need do is step outside my door to find inspiration popping, budding and petal-furling all around me. Sometimes even the weeds give me ideas (though not, I'm sorry to say, about weeding). This June, I've been firting with clematis, especially these violet and vanilla ones climbing over an iron trellis.

What's hanging out with the fleurs up there is a scarf in the works. Sometimes I just need scarf knitting for pure relaxation, to give me a break from working out design details for patterns pending and to experiment with a new color fest. This project is easy and I so love to see those new color combinations emerging.

I'll be away from June 30th-July 24th, so anyone trying to contact me by email may get a no response until my return. I've postdated weekly submissions so no one forgets about me while I'm gone but my housesitter doesn't use the computer so won't be collecting any mail.

Wait 'til you see what I'm cooking up when I return!

Rock Stars

CAN WE SURVIVE FALL FASHION'S BACK TO BLACK?

My clematis awakens

Would you have thought about combining purple-mauve with flushes of green-yellow? I stared at this awakening clematis the other day, marveling at the fluid combination. This same alchemy of unexpected color bubbles and boils in a hand-dyer's brew, which is why I love hand-dyed yarn so much --every hank a voyage of discovery.

Which reminds me, the fashion heralds are a-blare with warnings of black to come this fall. At first I recoiled, thinking 'how dare they eclipse color and light in the name of gloomy cool'? But then I reconsidered. I realized this gloomy came with a touch of mysterious glamour--black mixed with silver and gold--or came swathed in Victorian lace, both subdued yet witty.

Needles raised to charge position, I dug into my stash (probably stabbed myself in the process) and began a cape. This design will have lacey, loose-knit 'wings'  amid four triangles of black, burnt gold and silvery-grey, a bit modular in style. Hard to describe, perhaps, but it promises to be striking, reminiscent of ivory-inlaid ebony encrusted with chips of mother-of-pearl.

Don't worry, friends: we color addicts will survive this fashionable black stage just fine.

IN PRAISE OF ALL THINGS TOFFEE

Pralines&Cream whipped up

We won't plunge too deeply into my brain crevices in search of why I name so many things after food (case in point: I once had a dog named 'Pecan'. My excuse? He was a little nut who often, as a puppy, demonstrated the first syllable in his name), but it follows that one who loves color and texture might also love all things edible. Caramel, brown sugar and vanilla? Bliss by any other name...

As it happens, pralines remind me of my one and only voyage to New Orleans, only months before the devastation. As brief as my time there, I felt the city in every pore, enthralled as millions of others in it's unique and powerful atmosphere and by the soul of its people. Almost at once I began working on a novel, which will probably never see the light of day, an excerpt of which I share with you here:

'The air hung with such humidity in the streets of New Orleans that afternoon that her limbs seemed coated in syrup. Praline heat, she thought, as she steadied her breathing--sticky and seductive. She smelled the brown sugar wafting from the open windows of the candy shops, imagined the rum cocktails pouring in the bars lining the streets. Everything in this town seemed to simmer and boil until it had distilled into something rich, intoxicating, and far too luscious for a single taste.'

Like pralines, New Orleans sticks to the memory, evocative, mysterious and like no place else on earth.