Kate Davies is hosting a summer knitting community: a mystery knit-along, a series of book discussions, and a bunch of new pattern releases, all with a Margery Allingham theme. I had never heard of Margery Allingham, but I am a fan of Golden Age detective fiction and I do love a good summer MKAL. So I jumped in.
I've read and enjoyed the first two books and KD's essays on the books. I made a hat for Joe's girlfriend from one of the new patterns. (There's an announcement tucked into that last sentence: Joe's girlfriend has been deemed knit-worthy.) But I am fretting a bit about my yarn selections for the MKAL shawl.
Mostly I think it will be fine. I'm making a big stripy diamond in colors I like. Stella thinks it looks pleasingly like a stingray.
As always, the devil is in the details. I was instructed to choose five colors. I was supposed to have a hundred grams each of a light color, a dark color, and a pop color, and 75 grams each of two medium colors that would play nicely with the others.
I chose a pretty aqua for my light color and a deep deep blue-green for my dark color. It probably looks black in the picture, but imagine if navy blue and the deepest forest green had a baby. That's my dark color. I chose a vivid lime green for my pop color. For the medium toned colors I chose a pretty mossy grassy green and a skein of self-striping sock yarn in blues and greens.
But two things are niggling at me. One is the yarn quantities, which I did exactly backward: I have 100g of the medium colors, and <100g of all three of the dominant colors. Before I cast on I thought to myself, "Oh, I only used a little of my dark color in the Princess Bride shawl. It will be fine." Now I am tearing through it an alarming rate. I knew that I had used a little of the lime green color in my pandemic hat, but I only remembered today that I had used the aqua as the contrast color in Alex's Space Invaders socks.
This seems like a setup for an un-fun game of yarn chicken later in the summer.
The second niggly thing is that there is a whole lot of lime green. I read "pop color" and thought "occasional accent," but no-- there's a reason I was instructed to acquire >400 yards of it. I am not wild about big blocks of lime green, but big blocks of lime green are about to happen.
Well, that's how it goes, I guess: you buy the MKAL ticket, you take the MKAL ride.
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