Am I Blue . . .

Cast into the Deep Blue Sea

Very! This blue soaks your eyes. I love it.

What To Do When . . .

You see that you have woven something (or made anything, for that matter) and you aren't satisfied with the way it turned out?

I tried a simple modification on one of the scarves I made last month. I wanted to weave a thicker yarn at regular intervals at the ends. I counted the picks (number of times I threw the shuttle for the weft), added the thick yarn, counted some more, and added it again. This is a loosely woven scarf. The sett (space between the warp yarns) is wider. But I also controlled the weft spacing in the way I pushed the beater (to make the weft yarns tighter, or in this case, looser). The latter is, apparently, not constant. I tried and it looks good but when you add a more striking contrast, you really notice the difference.

Or, and this may shock people who know me, I could have counted wrong because I didn't bother to write down the numbers. "20" is easy to remember. But so is "15". And "30".

Anyway, the contrasting design was not symmetrical and it drove me nuts. I don't know if it would have bothered anyone else. I like asymmetry but some people don't.

If you bake a cake and it comes out a little lop-sided, what do you do? Add some more frosting (and who doesn't like more frosting?), make some frosting flowers (or buy some). Drop some Red Hots all over it. Maybe even add some of those little paper umbrellas. I would probably do all of the above and add gumdrops to boot. See! You won't even notice that it's lop-sided. You'll just be amazed at all the neat stuff I put on it.

Ok. It's cake and it would have tasted good even if it had slid off the plate, without all the extras. And it was probably for your family or friends, who would love you no matter what the cake looked like.

But a scarf? Not so much. So, after composting (ok, not LITERALLY composting, just fomenting design ideas), I decided to add a crocheted flower one one end and extra fringe on the messed up design area on the other. Let me amend that: it wasn't really messed up. Each end looked good independently. They just bothered me together.

It's still asymetrical but in a more planned out way. Which, ironically, works better than something that happens imperfectly asymetrical on its own. I'm not sure I like that logic (or lack thereof).

Anyway, and more importantly, I like the scarf.