Knitted Butterflies

So it’s been cold and grey and damp in a way that suggests the arrival of spring. This cold-and-grey is definitely different from winter cold-and-grey because this is cold-and-grey-WITH-DAFFODILS.* Here’s what happens when you try and photograph daffodils at dusk in the pouring rain after an exceptionally tricky day at work. (Don’t try this at home, folks: as you can see, it’s liable to end with wobbly edges.)

So in the absence of spring sunshine, we have to make our own colour. Fortunately, a beloved friend arrived for chatter/wine/dinner/sleeps, and she came bearing tulips. She has taste, does my friend:-

Tulips rock, so here’s a gratuitous bonus tulip shot:-

I can’t wait until they do their floppy tulipy thing and drape themselves over the edge of the jug with louche abandon. When they do that, they’re the 1920s flapper-girls of the floral world, leaning laughingly backwards over a rail, champagne coupe in hand, carefree.

There’s been knitting too, of course, but you probably already guessed that. The population of home-grown butterflies has been increasing at a rate that suggests infestation, and after quite a few versions of the pattern, I think I’ve designed a better butterfly.

They’re fun to make, if fiddly. All those DPNs…

In the making, I got to indulge my inner ten-year-old for half an hour and play with beads.

Actually, scrub that: my ten-year-old self was a serious character, more interested in graphing how the temperature at different depths in the pond varied throughout the day, and in damming the scarily-polluted micro-stream at the bottom of the garden (only occasionally flooding the neighbours’ lawn in the process) than in playing with beads. Gosh, that was a long sentence. Clearly I didn’t spend enough of my childhood learning to be succinct.

(Seriously, though: despite the skin-reddening pollution, there were freshwater shrimps, water lice, and whirligig beetles a-plenty, all of which were properly cool.)

Oh look, butterfly shadows!

But let’s get back to the knitting. I think the final version of the butterfly garland needs… something else, but I’m not sure what. Much pondering is occurring.

And whilst I ponder, I’m chaotic and distracted about everything else, as per usual. Mostly this tendency is a huge disadvantage. (A protracted n=1 study suggests that it only ends in stress…) But just occasionally there can be small advantages. Like when the new edition of Simply Knitting plops through the letterbox onto the doormat, and you flick through its pages with cheery curiosity… And you notice a column with a name and photo that definitely ring a bell somewhere very far buried in your tangled brain. And it actually takes the vast majority of a second for you to twig that this is your column and that the name and photo are yours. Duh!

In my defence, I had small children pesking around my knees at the time, and it would’ve been hard to focus on anything else even if the house had been on fire. “Boys, for the love of yarn, will you please stop sticking play-dough up my nose… Hey, why is there so much smoke round here? … No, I will not let you drive Mummy’s car. Whaddya mean, ‘why’? Because you’re FIVE, that’s why… Hang on, aren’t those orange things leaping from the bannisters actually flames? … Oh I give up: just take Daddy’s car keys and drive his car: just don’t tell him that I let you…”

Ah, another day in Twisted-land. I’d add something saccharine along the lines of ‘and we wouldn’t have it any other way’, but that wouldn’t be strictly true, however much I love the blighters.

Adios yarniacs. May stunning creations fly from your needles/hooks.

 

*I know, I mentioned the unseasonal daffs in my falling-in-the-flood post, but there were only a few of those. Now, you can’t move in Oxfordshire for daffodils.