Knititude

Easily amused

The other day I walked into a paint store to pick up some color swatches, and when I spotted this sign taped onto the counter in front of the Benjamin Moore display, I had to snap a photo.  I can only imagine the event(s) that led to them posting this notice!

 I took the photo below in Greensboro, North Carolina.  "Gnam gnam" means "yum yum!" in Italian.  If you add an "m" to the last syllable of "lasagna," you will be close to the correct pronunciation of "gnam" (and if at the same time as you say it, you touch your forefinger to your cheek and twist your hand back and forth, you will look Italian!).  

But I don't know, to me the words "gnam gnam" look more Indian than Italian, and yet "gelato" is obviously Italian; I wonder if the name has caused some confusion among the locals?

Rhodopsin*

I've been doing a lot of swatching in the past few weeks, both for unbloggable projects and for this capelet (thanks, Karen and Erin-- "capelet" is a much better term than "poncho"!).  I really loved the Dream in Color "Grey Tabby" swatch for the capelet, but I only had two skeins of it, and had trouble locating more, so I decided to try another one of their many tempting colorways. 

My nearby LYSs don't carry Dream in Color Classy, so after looking at many of their colorways on different websites, and worked into different projects on Ravelry, I finally bought some Visual Purple online fromWoolgirl (great store and wonderful customer service, by the way).  Unfortunately, each of the three skeins was noticeably different in color from the others-- not completely unexpected for handpainted yarns, which don't usually have dye lots.  So I decided that, as is generally recommended with these yarns, I would have to alternate skeins, working a couple of rounds in one, and then switching to another. 

After a few rounds I put this project aside for a week or so-- I just got scared by how very intensely purple it was!  (Much more vivid than it looks in these photos.)  I started thinking about how my wardrobe tends toward neutrals, and wondered if I would ever dare to wear such a royally assertive hue...but every time I glanced over at the fledgling capelet, I was struck by how gorgeous the color variations were, and how they changed in different lights (the bluer photo was shot in daylight only, and the redder one under incandescent light and daylight combined).  So after I got used to the purple, I started working again. 

But I'm afraid this project is destined for frogging, for a few reasons; I might have persevered if only one of them was true, but the combination was too much.  1) It's a pain to switch skeins every couple of rounds.  2) More importantly, it leaves little floats on the wrong side, and when I swatched this stitch pattern, I realized that the wrong side is very interesting, so I want this capelet to be reversible.  If the yarn wasn't superwash, I would have done felted joins-- but it is, so I didn't (and what a pain all those felted joins would have been!).  3) Most importantly, I think it would have been too big.  It was a bit tricky measuring my swatch because of the way the stitch pattern slants.

In the future, I will try to do as Connie recommended:  buy my handpainted yarn from a bricks-and-mortar store, so I can match the skeins, and forget about alternating from skeins while knitting.  Luckily, I had also purchased (online from WEBS) five skeins of Dream in Color Classy in Deep Seaflower, a wonderful combination of blues and violets, and was able to match three of those quite closely-- I think.  So I've already started my capelet again, with fewer stitches and a slight change in stitch pattern.  Wish me luck!

*Rhodopsin-- the retinal pigment that allows us to see in low-light conditions-- is also known as "visual purple."  From Wikipedia:  "Exposed to light, the pigment immediately photobleaches, and it takes about 30 minutes to regenerate fully in humans."  This is why it takes your eyes awhile to adapt when you go from a bright to a low light environment.  Did you know that your eyes dark-adapt separately from each other?  This is kind of fun:  in a dim room, when your eyes are fully dark-adapted (so you can see objects in the room fairly well), cover one completely, and then turn a bright light on for a few seconds.  When you turn it off, the uncovered eye will hardly be able to see anything, but if you uncover the other eye, it will still be dark-adapted, and you'll be able to see just as well as you could before!

A day on the life of an expat in Italy

Un giorno nella vita di un' espatriata in Italia

This morning after I dropped my son off at middle school, I saw this poster on the wall outside the school.  Apparently the Lega Nord thinks that Italians, like the Native Americans, will all end up on reservations if immigration into Italy is allowed to continue ("They allowed immigration-- Now they live on a reservation!").  There are so many reasons that this is ridiculous that I won't even try to enumerate them.

Stamattina, subito dopo ho accompagnato mio figlio alla scuola, ho visto questo posto sul muro esterno della scuola.  Sembra che la Lega Nord pensi che gli italiani, come gli indiani d'America, finiranno tutti sulla riserva se l'immigrazione sara' permesso di continuare.  Ci sono cosi' tante ragioni perche' questo e' ridicolo che non provi di elencarle.

On a more amusing note, I stopped at a gas station around 1 p.m., so of course (like most stores in Italy) it was closed for lunch-- but one could still buy gas at an automated pump by inserting an ATM card or cash into a machine.  I tried over and over again to feed a crisp new 20 euro note into the machine, and it kept rejecting it; finally a motorcyclist who was waiting to fill his own tank told me (in Italian) "It's too new-- look, try this."  He crumpled up the bill he was holding, straightened it out again, and inserted it into the machine-- which immediately swallowed it.  Only in Italy!

Un' argomento piu divertente:  Mi sono fermata ad una stazione di servizio circo l'una, quindi era chiusa per pranzo (come la maggiorparte dei negozi in Italia)-- pero' introdendo una carta del bancomat oppure una banconota, si potrebbe comprare la benzina alla macchina automatica.  Ho provato ripetutamente di inserire un contante nuovo di 20 euro nella macchina, e l'ha ripetutamente respinto.  Finalmente mi ha detto un motociclista "E' troppo nuovo-- guardi, io lo faccio cosi'"-- ha spiegazzato il contante nella sua mano, l'ha rilisciato, l'ha inserito nella macchina-- e l'ha subito inghiottito.  Solamente in Italia!

(By the way, if you are filling your tank at a gas station here, don't put "gasolio" into your gasoline-powered car-- in spite of the name, it's actually diesel!).

Happy Halloween

I told you I was sick.

Raiding Junior's Closet

 Razziando l'armadio dei figli!

With two sons*, I always thought I would miss out on the joys of having daughters "borrow" items from my closet-- and perhaps returning the favor.

Con due figli maschi*, pensavo sempre di perdere le gioie di avere figlie, coloro che potrebbero prendere a prestito le cose dal mio armadio-- ed anche di perdere la possibilita' di prendere a prestito le loro cose.

 But maybe I was too quick to call Florin a "child's" vest; I was looking at it the other day, and thought, "I wonder if that would fit me."  And the result?  Not bad; not bad at all!

Pero', forse ero troppo affrettata quando chiamavo il Florin un gile' dei bambini; lo stavo guardando l'altro giorno, e pensavo, "Mi chiedo se quello mi starebbe bene."  Niente male; niente male affatto!

*I do have two grown stepdaughters, but somehow I doubt that raiding their closets would do anything to endear me to them (hi Carmen!).

*Ho due figliastre grandi, ma dubito che di razziare i loro armadi mi renderebbe caro a loro.

Worth a thousand words

Too much of a good thing

I can find colors I like within every hue of the rainbow-- but that doesn't mean I want to wear them all at once.  So unfortunately my enthusiasm for this Filatura di Crosa "Dusk" yarn, colorway #5, waned as I knit along and revealed color after color which had been hidden inside the skein.  You may have guessed (since I'm showing a photo here) that this will not be one of the swatches I will be sending along with a design submission to a magazine.  It's oriented this way because I had the idea of working the piece sideways so that the stripes of color would be slimmingly vertical.  (Maybe this concept would work better with a different yarn; it doesn't seem fully successful to me in this case.) 

As someone who doesn't use much variegated yarn, this specimen was interesting for me because the color is not a simple repeat; several strands of yarn which change colors at different rates have been twisted together, so that the overall color effect is ever-changing, with more heathered hues giving way to brighter sections.  I personally would have been happier with a much narrower range of colors, such as those shown in these two snippets of the photo above.

However, I didn't give up on finding a way to use this stuff:  I then tried combining it with a solid color yarn, the idea being to "tame" all those rowdy colors.  Perhaps it was largely the stitch pattern that left me saying "beh"*, but once again, running the entire ROYGBV gamut (this time with colorway #4 and a greenish instead of pinkish background) struck me as, I don't know, overly exuberant.  The colors pictured below are quite muted compared to the real thing, by the way.  As you can see from the photo below, I was still looking for a way to use those color changes in a vertical direction.

(If anyone is interested, the stitch pattern is "String of Purls"-- cute, eh?-- from Barbara Walker's 2nd Treasury.)

*"Well?" in Italian.  Gotta play Scrabble in Italian sometime, so I can use "beh," along with "boh" (who knows, I don't know), "ni" (neither yes nor no), "ne" (some of, of them), "ci" (us, there), "voi" (you plural), "noi" (we)....

A few things you may not have known about Italy

(having nothing to do with the food, and very little to do with the scenery).

(Se sia Italiana/o, immagino che gia sappia queste cose.)

1)  Radio stations do the traffic report for the entire country at once.   In Como, where we are within shouting distance of Switzerland, not only do we hear about the traffic on the autostrada from the south Como exit to the Swiss border:  we also find out about accidents and traffic jams in Rome and in Naples.

2)  There is no word for "jaywalker"; in Italian those socks would be called "coloro che attraversano la strada all'infuori dei passaggi pedonali," or "those who cross the street outside of the pedestrian crosswalk."  Actually, they would just be called "Jaywalkers."

3)  According to an Italian women's magazine I read recently, Italian women are more concerned with cellulite than with wrinkles (no wonder, considering all the underwear stores displaying thongs and those funny little panties that only cover the top two-thirds of the butt cheeks)-- hence all of the anti-cellulite products advertised in pharmacy windows.  I thought this ad was especially eye-catching (ouch!).

Vi raccomando una visita

(Or:  what I did on my vacation.) 

(Oppure:  che cosa ho fatto durante la festa della Liberazione.)

Last week I finally got around to visiting Villa Carlotta, further down the lake in Tremezzo.  The garden is renowned, in particular for its azaleas and rhododendrons-- and right now they are in full bloom!  Azaleas the size of tour buses and  rhododendrons as tall as houses-- unbelievable.  With Lake Como and Bellagio as a backdrop, and behind them a line of snow-capped mountains-- you must go there. Go there now. 

La settimana scorsa sono finalmente andata a Villa Carlotta, piu lontano sul lago a Tremezzo.  Il giardino e famoso, innanzitutto per le azalea e i rhododendri-- ed adesso sono in piena fioritura!   Azalea grandi come  pullman e rhododendri alti come case-- incredibile.  Con Lago di Como e Bellagio in sfondo, e dietro le montagne nevose-- dovete andarci.  Ci andate ora.

And then go to Venice, but not to Venice itself (yes, okay, go, it's a must, even though Piazza San Marco is chock-a-block with pigeon shit and tourists):  take a water taxi across the Venetian lagoon to the island of Torcello, have lunch at the Locanda Cipriani, and gaze across their garden at the centuries-old churches of Santa Fosca and Santa Maria Assunta.  Mamma mia.

E poi andate a Venezia, ma non proprio Venezia  (va bene, si deve andarci, anche se Piazza San Marco e piena di guano di piccione e turisti):  prendete un vaporetto attraverso la laguna veneziana all' isola di Torcello, pranzate alla Locanda Cipriani, e guardate le chiese antiche Santa Fosca e Santa Maria Assunta attraverso il suo giardino.  Caspita.

The Invasion of the Tomas Swatches

With each of my last few projects, the number of swatches I have done has steadily increased (I hope this trend doesn't continue!).  I've done multiple swatches for different reasons; for my project for an upcoming issue of Vogue Knitting, it was to find different stitch patterns that played well together, while for Etrusca, it was to find an assortment of yarns in different gauges that could be substituted for the Karabella Empire Silk I used-- and to choose among several stitch patterns.  The swatches pictured here are for the next project I hope to turn into a pattern for sale:  a top-down* (my first!!) raglan pullover using Tilli Tomas Fil de la Mer, a lovely, lovely yarn.  By the way, I'm NOT planning to incorporate all of these stitch patterns into one garment.

On a COMPLETELY different topic, I read in some trashy magazine at the gym that various actresses have "girl crushes" on Angelina Jolie, and I thought, "Hmm.  To each her own, I guess."  Then I wondered who my girl crush would be, and having recently seen A Bridge to Terabithia, Zooey Deschanel came to mind.  Then I saw this article about her recent CD release; in the article she is called a "crafty girl" who knits and crochets.  OK, found my girl crush.  Who's yours?!

*Knitting From the Top by Barbara Walker is a great book, but I kinda wish they'd update that cover photo.