Orange and Ivory

This is what I was working on during my vacation to the cottage a few weeks ago, with book for scale. And look, the colors match! Quite unintentionally, might I add. The hook is orange too.

The yarns are one skein of KnitPicks Bare Superwash worsted wool and one skein of varigated orange superwash sock yarn from Fearless Fibers. The orange is held double, the ivory single, using a size H crochet hook. The pattern is modified from 200 Crochet Blocks by Jan Eaton.

You can see from the ball of orange how much I have left. I alternate between making an orange circle in an ivory square with making an ivory circle in an orange square and will stop when I run out of the orange.

Here's a close up of the squares, where you can kind of see the varigation.

I'll sew up the squares with a skein of Bare in fingering weight that I have already Kool-aid dyed in varigated yellow.

For the border, I'll Kool-aid dye a skein of worsted weight Bare in orange and yellow to try to match the yarn from Fearless Fiber. I have a skein of worsted weight Bare that I've already dyed yellow, so I'll overdye it in orange. I've never tried it, so this should be interesting.

All this orange is quite a departure for me. For the longest time I really did not like the color. But as I began to get into knitting again, I became exposed to variegated yarn. Then I found Koigu and then indie dyers and yarns with colors I never thought about putting together. My horizons were really broadened and now I find myself really liking this orange.

So here's another picture, but in a different medium:

The clay body is raku, which fires white. While leather hard, I used a stencil to carve the blossoms in and painted with an orange underglaze. After the bisque firing, I put a clear glaze over it and high fired it to cone 6. It's about 6 inches tall and I think I started with about a pound of clay.

Next week I'm signing up for pottery class again. There's a new instructor who will be teaching us how to make big pieces on the wheel with lots of clay. So instead of coming home with 20 small bowls, I'll be coming home with just a few really big bowls.

What can I say? I have a thing for bowls.