Going for the GOLD!

...yarn, that is.

I’ve done all the heavy lifting for my Pagan sweater. Using Excel, I reduced the cells down to little squares and mapped out the entire yoke design. I’m going with Runes in a circle around the yoke and some decorative stitches around those. I’m aiming for tiny Thor’s hammers and little Goddess symbols, but am not entirely sure how well those are going to come out in “fair isle” type knitting. I’m probably going to do some swatches and experiment before I attempt anything on the actual sweater.

So, that brings me to my current dilemma—the colors for the yoke design. One would think it would be easy to find gold and silver toned (slightly metallic) yarns, to nicely offset the navy blue of the rest of the sweater. Well...one would be wrong. I had last week off, and I spend most of it combing our LYS, Michaels, Wal-Mart, JoAnn Fabrics, and AC Moore, frantically searching for the perfect shades of gold and silver (well, okay, this wasn’t such a hardship...it was yarn shopping, after all).

The good news: as you see from my picture, I finally managed to find the perfect shade of gold at AC Moore. The bad news: it’s only available as EMBROIDERY FLOSS!!! I stood in AC Moore for about 15 minutes staring at the display, trying to decide how many tiny floss skeins I’d have to buy to create my yoke pattern and exactly how many strands I’d need to combine to equal worsted weight yarn. I took a skein and walked up and down the aisles of the store, trying to find THAT exact color, only in actual yarn. No dice. Even Red Heart, that company that has perfected every known color under the sun, including neon traffic cone orange, didn’t have anything.

I bought the tiny skein and performed the same exercise at a ton of different stores, but no match.

Yesterday, I finally decided to just skip attempting to be Monet with the colors and just suck it up, buy some Lion Brand Glitterspun online, and get on with it...

Yeah, you guessed it—Glitterspun has been DISCONTINUED! I found a kind soul on Ravelry who can sell me two gold skeins, but now I’m going to have to find two silver skeins...

Must get on eBay...must not appear too desperate...

The Idea...or, why I'm just not like other people...

I've decided I'm just not hardwired like other people...

In my daily existence, I'm surrounded by people whose idea of a good time is yelling their lungs out at a sporting event, (whether this be pro-ball or little league, and whether this be in person or on their own sofa with a bag of Doritos), going to some far-flung part of the globe, but somehow losing their luggage in Albuquerque, or drinking themselves into a stupor and dancing the night away. Okay, I do get the dancing...this is probably the only “active” activity I share with my fellow people...I adore dancing.

However, no one around me, except for the select few who know but tolerate my oddness, appreciates my excitement over completing the Saturday crossword without peeking at the answers on-line. They don't get enjoyment of an entire afternoon reading a Dan Brown book, and getting sucked into Robert Langdon’s crazy existence of conspiracy theories and Pagan symbolism, while sitting in a lawn chair outside, listening to the animal life in the backyard. Between the squirrels, the chipmunks, the myriad species of birds, the deer, the wild turkeys, and the occasional bear, we have more wildlife than Animal Planet.

Most importantly, no one quite gets the excitement of puzzling out a pattern...

I have an idea for a sweater pattern. I want to make a yoke sweater, but—speaking of Langdon—I want to put Pagan symbols all along the yoke of the sweater and around the sleeves. I have searched on-line, I have asked the 200 kajillion knitters on Ravelry, I have asked sentient, in-the-flesh human beings, and no one has any idea where I can find exactly what I’m looking for. I knew it was going to be a crap shoot to find an actual sweater pattern like this, but I figured I could at least find some motif patterns to incorporate into a basic yoke. No dice. Anything I’ve found so far is entirely too large. I want small, subtle shapes that will make a large, beautiful final design.

On my way to the hairdresser the other day, it hit me...I’m going to have to create the pattern myself!

As I drove along, I began puzzling out in my head how I would approach this—what symbols to use, how to arrange them, how large should they be, etc. Do I want to go with one row of each design, or do I want the rows that are varied? Do I want this to be multi-colored, or do I want to do just black and white? Do I want this to be just the yoke, or do I want to do something different with the collar? Do I...?

In this frame of mind I walked into the hair salon.

“So,” my hairdresser cheerfully asks, “What have you been doing with your summer?”

You know telling her that I was in the process of designing a Pagan sweater wasn’t going to be Answer #1...

“Not much...”