Blue violet is one of my favorite crayons. It’s purple enough to be pretty, but blue enough to not be quite so, well, PURPLE. It was harder to find in real life, perhaps because I wanted to get it perfect. And trust me, these two photos from the Gap are not perfect, but in real life, they were precisely blue violet. And then you’ve got some flowers because purple flowers are pretty nice.
As I finished the last rows on the scarf I made for Dan for Christmas, I realized with a jolt that I haven’t made a scarf for MYSELF in a very, very long time. I used to crochet scarves a lot. Because crochet is so mindnumbingly relaxing. And because while I’m not the word’s best crocheter, I sure have mastered the long, narrow rectangle. Anyway. I looked back in the archives and discovered that I was right, and I haven’t made myself a scarf in four years. (Unless you count the only thing I ever made from the Happy Hooker book, which I don’t, not really.)
So it was past time to make myself a scarf. I decided it should be aqua and red, partly because it’s an awesome combination, and partly because I have a red winter coat and I have a brand new turquoise down vest waiting impatiently in my closet for the weather to get warmer and all this damn snow to melt. I’m nothing if not practical, people.
And as I polled the universe about how to arrange my stripes, a challenge emerged. My own mother dared me to crochet my scarf in a completely random pattern. I should toss my carefully randomized graph-paper rendering. And ignore mathematical sequences like Fibonacci numbers, or the random stripe generator. No, she dared me to just wing it. Because I think the thought of me struggling over what counts as really random made her giggle. Friends advised me to drink copiously while working. And I learned that I’m not the only one who feels a little creepy-crawly when thinking about a scarf whose ends don’t mirror each other.
Is my brain really that inherently ordered? (I’m of course thinking back to that fateful personality test we took at that librarian workshop. You know, the one where I was deemed to be the gold personality – the rule-following, order-loving, organized one. The geeky, stick-in-the-mud, no-fun-for-you one! Not the creative, emotional, sensitive one! Or the logical, questioning, scientific one! And surely not the outgoing, party-lovin’, loud one.)
Crocheting the scarf turned out to be quite the mental challenge. With each new stripe, my brain started whirring. “Okay, the red stripe you just finished was two rows. I did a blue stripe with two rows before that one. Am I putting in a pattern of two-row stripes here? Am I using red enough? Maybe I need a really, really big blue section here instead. And after that a short blue row with some longer red ones. No! Short red ones. No! One long red one and one short blue one and then a short red one and a short blue one. No! That’s a pattern!”
It was EXHAUSTING.
After I measured out to just past where I thought the middle should go, I decided it would be a good idea to count the rows of each color, just to make sure I wasn’t using way too much of one color or the other. So I counted the rows at the point where the above picture was taken.
And to my utter HORROR, there were EXACTLY 50 rows of red and 50 rows of aqua. And I DIDN’T DO IT ON PURPOSE. I was trying to be random! My brain IS that inherently organized?
I’m so embarrassed.
But I kept going, and at the very end counted the rows again to make sure I’d end up with the same number of rows of each color. I suppose that’s against the spirit of the project, but even I have my limits.
In the end, I’m pretty happy with the result. Is it a little TOO overly long? Yes. Does it need some breaking in thanks to the cheap yarn? Yes, especially compared to the pashmina style scarves I’m used to. Am I totally psyched with the random-ness of the stripes? Hell yes. Will I embark on another “random” project soon? Probably not, no. And that’s okay with me.
I was surprised upon looking back at the photos I took yesterday at the boardwalk that I spotted so much cheery yellow on what was a very cold, very gloomy, very gray kind of day. I really like that.
There’s something about you in wintertime. Maybe it’s simply because that’s not when we’re supposed to want to visit you. But I’ve been taking trips to see you (and to take photos) in the dead of winter for years now, and since I had today off for Presidents’ Day, and there’s still so much snow on the ground, I figured why not take the trip? The truth is, I often feel a lot of pressure to use days off to find something really spectacular to take pictures of, just because I have the time to drive to wherever I want to go, and of course, the daylight. But I get into these routines, and Asbury Park has quickly become one of my most frequent photo-taking destinations. Of course, looking at these pictures, I remember why all over again.
Anyway, thanks for the inspiration. And the cold toes. And the fresh air. I kinda like you.
Love,
Elizabeth
Pacific Blue was this week’s crayon for sixty-four colors, and it proved to be a little tricky. Or, I’m a perfectionist. I only found/staged one shot that I think counts this week, but that’s one of the reasons I like having a set for it; I can always add future shots and continue to be just as perfectionisty as I like. I did find a few in the archives that seem just about right.
Yellow was such a great color for a cold, gloomy midwinter week. And once I got into the groove of Crayola crayon yellow (as opposed to construction yellow or orange yellow) I started seeing it everywhere. (And very frequently in my photo archives, too!) The first two were taken this week; the others are older but still good.
GOventure day three was a little harder. I confess I spent most of the day walking around waiting for a coincidence to hit me square in the face. That didn’t exactly happen. So when I got home from work, I was thinking about coincidences. Does it count as a coincidence if I can’t think of any when I’m trying to? Not really. Murphy’s Law, more like it.
So I got out my paper and my stamps and set to cutting and gluing my most boring, geometric, office supply type papers on a piece of 4×6 cardstock, pondering as I went. I’m not sure how I feel about coincidences in the end, because it’d be so easy to go back and think of some random thing, some tiny bit of chance, and start plotting out how much it changed the course of your life. And I do believe it happens, more than we realize. It’s a crazy thought, thinking about how much of our lives is based in random chance encounters or discoveries.
But I think in the end I personally am a little more fond of the idea that we make our own chances. Our actions, decisions, and choices, how we REACT to these coincidences that are all around us, THAT is what it’s all about.
The inspiration for day two of GOventure week is invisible, and I had a lot of ideas, most of them for photos. And then I was at work today, and the perfect thing hit me. See, being a librarian is pretty awesome, most of the time. My job is helping people find what they’re looking for, helping them figure out HOW to do what they need to do, and I love the scavenger hunt aspect of it. Most of the time.
Except some days I almost wish I WAS invisible. That I could hide (really hide) in the stacks of books and just quietly make sure they’re in order. And read a few inside flaps while I’m there. And that people couldn’t, you know, see me in order to find me and ask me questions. The best I could manage was hiding in the bathroom for a few extra moments. It helped. It doesn’t happen all the time, true. But the stereotype of a quiet librarian stamping, shelving, and shhh-ing isn’t really very accurate AT ALL.
I’ve been inspired by crafty blogs like Elise‘s for a while, in my quest to add more craftiness to my life this past year. So when she and Kal invited anyone interested to join them in a week of GOventures, I thought it was a pretty cool idea. The plan was that Elise and Kal would come up with prompts every day for a week, and we’d use the prompts to do something (anything) creative. I was a little intimidated by the prospect, because I tend to craft in spurts (other than the whole photography thing), so weekday craft plans don’t always pan out. But Jodi and I emailed about it, and our conclusion was that at the very least, it’ll be fun. Even if we can’t keep up, getting your brain thinking in a creative kind of way is the whole POINT.
Anyway, day one’s prompt is wander, and I couldn’t help but go right to one of my constant battles: a wandering mind. Sometimes it can be pretty awesome, but sometimes the endless internal analysis and debate just makes my head spin. It’s something I wish I could reign in a little, but am hesitant (not to mention UNABLE) to really curb entirely. My brain is always, always wandering. And it sure can be an adventure. (Don’t even get me started about how I’ve been bitten by the “I want short hair” bug again!)
she likes stripes 