Blind love

This is a sad story. But have faith, there may be light at the end of the tunnel.

A month or so ago, I bought the Phildar Tendances Printemps 2005 catalogue. I fell head over heels in love with the Chanel-ish cover jacket and after some consideration I decided to knit this and wear it with a summery dress or skirt for the Embassy reception 6 June. Today we went to the Phildar store in Longwy with one mission: buy yarn.

It may not have been a wise idea to dress the way I did: pink socks, pink underwear, pink t-shirt and a pink cardigan. (Black shoes, black trousers, black handbag, but still...) By the time I came to the shopping centre, I was convinced that I needed any summery colour but pink in my life. The original mix of colours was out of the picture even before I started looking.
(The original yarns and colours are:
Clapotis: barbe à papa (which means spun sugar, which is often coloured pink or blue in French village carnivals. In this case the sugar is variegated pink, shocking)
Sunset: rosée, a rosy pink fine thread with metallic lustre
Eponge: blanc, a white terry cloth bouclé.)

The shop didn't have many balls of Sunset. In fact, there were only three colours I could choose from unless I wanted to place an order and come back later. They had irisée, an almost transparent thread with flecks of iridiscent colour, a lagoon blue and something dark grey. (Update: Sunset, as presented by the Dutch company Breiweb.) Since my deadline is ridiculously short - by my standards at least, a jacket in four weeks?! - I wanted to get all the necessary yarn at once. I soon realized that even Clapotis and Eponge where in short supply in some of the colorways. I could feel disaster breathing down my neck, but hey, I really wanted to wear this jacket for the reception.

Given the stock of the different yarns, the mismatching shades and my absolute dislike for yellow, there was only one colour combination I could pick in the end. Clapotis in Chlorophylle, Sunset in Irisée and Eponge in white. Nice, spring-coloured, fresh. The price was far more than I had expected, making this my most expensive knitting project ever. But hey, love is in the air!

As soon as we came home, I cast on for a swatch. Ouch. OUCH! It suddenly struck me that the sophisticated look of the pink jacket in the original colourway came from the rose-coloured Sunset that changed the white eponge into a shimmering pink. In my case, the iridiscent Sunset made the white eponge shiny and bright, contrasting the very bright green. Instead of a tweedy look with some shimmer, my swatch was glaring stripes with a trashy plastic look. My ten-year-old passed by and asked innocently if it was a sweater to show that I'm a fan of Hammarby. My camera got left behind at a friends house this weekend, so I can't show any photos yet. You'll have to trust me on this.

So. My current plan is to knit this little cardigan (left page) in white eponge with irisée stripes of sunset AND the green Clapotis pullover to the right. The yarn for the chanel jacket is enough for the two of them! I may need to change the pullover a bit, I have 13 balls and the pattern calls for 14 in the size I fear is mine.

I have a second plan for the green clapotis, which is to make a... clapotis. Just for fun... A more serious plan is to see if my favourite lace, the drooping elm leaf, would work on a green sweater. It just might. (The only picture I have found online is in this shawl. Did I mention that my camera is having fun elsewhere?

(A very nice blog: Knit and tonic.)