Modern Dinosaur

I was out walking the dog the other morning, and I saw a lizard I had never seen before! Looking it up online I narrowed it down, and believe that this is what I saw:

A Regal Horned Lizard.

Truly beautiful... in a dinosaur-ish way.

The Wedding Gift

June 28, 2008
Dan & Dorie

I have known Dorie for as long as I can remember. Our families made yearly camping trips to the coast of Maine together during our grade school years. I wanted to create something special and personal for Dorie and Dan's wedding gift. Of course, my first ideas were quite ambitious (matching sweaters) and as their wedding date approached with unbelieveable speed, I started to downsize. Maybe matching vests. More time flew by... and I thought even smaller; Mittens! (I did get some strange looks knitting mittens in the summer in Arizona)


I started coming up with ideas of what to knit on the mittens (spurred from the scarf and hat I had knit my father for his birthday last winter). Of course I had to have the date on there somewhere, and their names (Luckily they have short versions of their names which fit nicely into the pattern- more on that later). Then I began to think of a symbol that I could create that would span both mittens. Yin and yang are two complementary qualities, and one of the basic themes that underlies the yinyang symbol is harmonization; ensuring a constant, dynamic balance of all things. I also remembered that Dorie practices and studieds yoga. The yinyang seemed to fit perfectly.

Choosing the colors was easy. Red is the color of happiness and prosperity, and their invitations were red and ivory, leading me to believe that these were the colors that they had chosen for their wedding. The red I chose was a slightly more on the wine color side, but I liked how it complimented the ivory better than a brighter red. The ladies at my local yarn shop were ever so helpful in finding just the right colors, and they were so excited about the project!

The pattern gave me a bit of difficulty. First, I spent a few hours on excel creating the pattern for the images on the mittens. Then I started with one of the white mittens and using a fairisle pattern knitting in the round applying my adaptations. It came out way too small, and the red was visible through the white where I had carried it in the back. So I thought of using the intarsia technique I learned and used on the John Deere sweater. The only problem is that to use this technique you have to knit flat. So I modified the fairisle pattern I was using, and meshed it with a couple of other patterns I looked up online, and voila! I had a mitten that took a bit more effort to make (I knit each a front and back to each mitten and then sewed them together), but I really liked the results. One downfall.... I had 3 more to go!

Their wedding date came and went, but I knitted on... isn't there some unwritten rule (or it may be written somewhere) that you have up to a year to give a wedding gift?

Here's to Dorie and Dan and a wonderful life together.
Hope that these keep you warm in the winter!