A Basket Full of Potential

A Basket and a Color Study

Last December I travelled to Montana on business and managed to include a side trip to Mountain Colors
. I hadn't really been intending to acquire much yarn, but when I found the box of 3 Ply Targhee mill ends I did what I could to make room in my suitcase to bring home my own version of a Bitterroot Rainbow*. When I got them home, I couldn't resist coverting them from hanks into balls so that I could play with some simple but randomly colored log cabin squares.

For no particular reason (other than, perhaps, being easily distracted) the yarn got wound into balls but never actually started it's journey into log cabin squares. My fiber room is now on its way to becoming the nursery,** and as a part of the transformation, I re-discovered my basket of 3 Ply Targhee balls waiting patiently for me. And since it's still going to be a little while before I get back to sweater knitting, and I'm done with the other log cabin blanket project, I decided to play around with some new log cabin squares.

This time, however, I am coming at the project with very few pre-conceived notions of where I want to go. I think, instead, I am going to use this project as an opportunity to play with color. One thing that intrigues me greatly about quilting is how easy it is to do color studies. I love to start with a simple idea or favorite fabric and then run around a store looking for things that work with it. You can do this in knitting, but it is somewhat more complicated because knitting a log cabin square takes a good deal more time than cutting pieces out of fabric and machine sewing them together. But this targhee yarn is a heavy worsted so it knits up on fairly large needles. The variagations provide the same kind of opportunity to do a color study as if I was pulling fabrics down froma store wall. Knitting up a simple block (a center square surrounded by an outer square) takes relatively little time (probably an hour and a half or so) so I can start to see the results quickly, at least from the perspective of a knitting project.

I have created a few simple rules for this project:

• Each log cabin square is composed of 5 color sections. Each section must be a different color.
  
• The first colorway can be pulled from the basket at random, but the remaining 5 colors should "interact" with the first colorway by sharing some color component with one of the other blocks that it touches.
  
• A block is not considered finished until the ends have been woven in.
  

Initially I was just going to pull balls at random and let things lay how they would, but I have a great deal more of some colors than others, so I need to determine the order of the colors so that colors I have more of end up in the larger blocks. Otherwise, I suspect I will end up unable to maintain my desire to have 5 different colors in each square.

For the rest of this week, I'm going to show you the first four squares that I've worked up as part of this project, and I'll try to talk about why I put the colors together that I did in hopes that it encourages other people to take a stab at playing with color.***

* Mountain Colors is located in Montana's Bitterroot Valley and one of their signature colorways is called Bitterroot Rainbow.
** This was always what the room was intended for, it just took us longer to get to the point where we needed a nursery than I thought it would and since we weren't using the room for anything else, it became a space to store my fiber-related toys. Now, plans are underway to create a better creative space for me in our office so that Miss Z can have a creative space of her own.
*** And, hopefully, it will also give me some time to work on my other ongoing projects which have been going rather slowly as I work on house organization projects related to preparing for our new arrival.