Androids Have Feelings Too

I learned a new term on Ravelry. It's not a very nice term, but it certainly is descriptive. So the term in question is: clown vomit. Clown vomit describes how certain variegated yarns will knit up. They might be really pretty colours on the skein (or not), but when you knit them into objects, the result is not pretty.

Anyway.

I think I bought yarn -- how come every time I go to type "yarn" I always type "yearn" (talk about Freudian) -- that doesn't even need to be knit up in order to qualify as clown vomit.

Karen's Big Old Bag o' Clown Vomit



It's Wendy Fusion. The colourway is called "Saffron". I bought it thinking I would make a vest for myself out of it. (Obviously, I have reconsidered.) So what is my current proposed solution to owning a bag of 10 balls of clown vomit? I am thinking of buying another bag of 10 balls in a complementary colourway that will tone this down.

Oh, it's too depressing.

Quick! Let me show you how some of my hand-dyed yarn knits up.

Some of My Hand-Dyed Yarn



Don't call it clown vomit. The dark brown is purposely there to tone down the other colours. It's still depressing though, since I don't have the right size needle to knit what I want to knit, which is the Norwegian Sweet Baby Cap by Gro.

It's also depressing (to me -- no one else would really notice) that in the middle of the blue stretches there are always four or five black stitches, where the end of the plastic wrap wasn't sealed properly when the skein was being steamed and some black dye bled into the blue. (This was not my doing. Our host for the workshop, Buffy, kindly took care of that part for us. She must have got distracted when she was wrapping those skeins for me.)

Man, I think I'm channeling Marvin the Paranoid Android here. (It's a link to a video clip of all the best Marvin moments from the 2005 movie. Check out Trillian's argyle socks. They are a hit with H2G2 fans on Ravelry.)

All right, so one thing is working out for me, finally. I switched from winter white to grey as the contrast on my latest top-down hat and it looks much better.

Grey Contrast with Green/Blue Noro



I got a lot of knitting done on it at the Knit & Chat today. Unfortunately, my brain wasn't in the mood to follow the chart, so I ended up putting markers in for the repeats, not something I've had to do before.

Considering I have such limited brain capacity, I guess I'm not like Marvin after all. There's hope for me yet.