I must rush off for my INR test while in mid-flow this morning. Today is the great day when  my GP’s practice is meant to have joined the rest of the western world in having on-the-spot results.

Here is my “chaos basket” for Franklin’s Craftsy class:

I found it difficult to assemble. An awful lot of my yarn is sub fusc, as Franklin says all his knitting was in his youth. Then I found a bag with some colours which (in the over-used modern idiom) pop. I can’t imagine what I thought I wanted with them. There aren’t many questions and comments yet, attached to this new course, but even in the few there are, it was interesting to see how people found, when they actually began to search their stashes, that everything tended to one or two colours. Different colours for different people.

The homework for lesson two is to knit a swatch with two complementary colours, and one with three, chosen according to the principles Franklin has just been expounding. 

There are two difficulties. 1) Can I spare the knitting time? and 2) Have I assigned my balls of yarn to the colour wheel correctly? I.e, is this a true green or a yellow-green? Choosing complements depends on getting it right in the first place.

It’s all rather fun. I think I’ll take the time to knit the swatches. I can string them all together and have a Franklin Scarf when I finish.

Thank you for the interesting comments about madelinetosh. I wonder if “Georgia O”Keeffe“ has morphed somewhat in the last three years. My husband and I remember the missing sweater as green. And I’ve got the swatch: it looks completely green.

Skeindalous, I found a skein of Grey Gardens in my stash when I was composing my chaos basket yesterday. Time has completely obliterated the memory of why it is there. It is  nice, isn’t it? Or, rather, was. Victoria, I agree that Roasted Hatch Chillies looks pretty well perfect, quite apart from its wonderful name.

Alas, I took a skein of Whiskey Barrel in to the hospital to show my husband yesterday, and he likes it and wants to go ahead with that. It’s wonderful, no doubt about that, but a rather boring prospect for me to use it for something else as well as the Sous Sous.

One comfort is that a plain v-neck vest will be just the thing for practising Portuguese knitting. The Sous Sous with its constant switches from knit to purl — it would be an intolerable task in any less wonderful yarn — won’t do for a beginner. And the Tokyo shawl might be too fluffy.

Yesterday I finished the next assignment for the Sous Sous, and am now ready to start decreasing at the shoulders. That goes on for a long time. This baby is going to be a bit longer than specified. I didn’t swatch (and am very pleased with the fabric). The pattern was written for tosh DK. I won’t worry. It’s a matter of perhaps an extra inch and a half.

I think I’ll switch to the Tokyo shawl this evening. After knitting Franklin’s swatches?