I spent Saturday evening in front of the television watching back-to-back episodes of What Not to Wear on BBC America and knitting my third Mini Sweater. The first was practice, in Plymouth Encore. The second was in Silk Garden, my favorite yarn in all the world. It's not bad--could be slightly larger, but it's okay. This one, the third, is in Noro Shinano, which, since it's a bit heavier than Silk Garden, should end up making a sweater that's just right.

I wish I had saved something I found the other day, because I don't remember where I saw it. It was "Know thyself," but kind of as a list of all the things you should know about yourself--oh, as I wrote that I remembered. It was in a Cary Tennis column at Salon:

Know thyself. Literally. Know everything about thyself. Know thy diseases and know thy fears; know thy self-deceptions and thy sins; know thy weak bones and thy strong bones, thy capacities and thy limits; know thy neck stiffness, thy sleep requirements, thy food sensitivities, thy secret hatreds and biases, thy fetishes, thy body types, thy terrors and delights. Know thyself. Know everything. Turn away from nothing. Know it all.

I will probably explore that a little further over at the journal, but here's something that I finally know about myself with regard to knitting:

I'm pretty conservative when it comes to clothing. I wear mostly black or white; my current work "uniform" seems to be dark jeans and a white t-shirt, or occasionally black, and on rare occasions, red. I branch out more when it comes to shoes--my favorite tennis shoes are hot pink, and I'm currently wearing a pair of dark red thongs with antiqued silver accents--but I very seldom wear anything with a lot of color or pattern.

But when I knit, I need color, and, frankly, I need many colors. Variegated yarn sings to me.

I can totally relate to this:

Just like with variegated yarn, the excitement of seeing what colour is coming next charms and occupies me to no end. (This could explain much of my happiness in the world. I'm apparently simple.) It's hard to publicly admit this, but it turns out that despite my experience and education, all the intrigue that I need to sit gripped at the spinning wheel for hours is waiting to see what two colours will ply together for the next 10 cm.

Self-patterning sock yarns are heaven to me, but sometimes I want to knit something that's just a little larger. Once I discovered Noro yarns, nothing else really compares, just like Opal is, to me, the epitome of sock yarns. And out of all of Noro's yarns, Silk Garden is the one that would be my "desert island" yarn. It's endlessly fascinating to me, waiting to see which colors will come up next, and how they will look. When a brown shows up in the progression, I knit faster, trying to get rid of it, because I don't care for brown. When pink shows up, or turquoise, I'm thrilled! Isn't that silly? But oh, so true.

My love for variegated yarns started way back when I first learned to crochet with my grandmother's crochet thread and steel hooks. She loved variegated colors, too, and I still have a hard time not picking up a ball of that wonderful variegated pastel crochet cotton thread that I used to buy in the dime store. I probably still have a few balls of it upstairs in my secret crochet/pearl cotton stash, now that I think about it . . .