Cornflower

Lit. stitch

    I've matched my reading to my knitting (or vice versa) before, now it seems it's the turn of my embroidery. The crewel wool for a project I've just begun picks up all the colours on the cover of Tracy Chevalier's lovely new novel The Last Runaway - which happens to contain a great deal about needlework, specifically quilting (which I've been wanting to try for years).

    I feel the book should come with a "craft-inducing" warning on its jacket ...

Lit. knit - Whit's mitts on the mountain

    Once again, the knitting and the reading serendipitously go together, with The Yarn Yard's Ochil (100% Falkland merino, shade: Ruck 'n' Maul) matching the colours of the new Canongate Canons edition of The Living Mountain.

    In progress here is the first of a pair of Whit's ribbed hand warmers from the always lovely Purl Bee. What I set out to make was Whit's colourblock hand warmers, but despite having cast on for the smaller size, and after two or three inches, moved down to needles smaller than specified, they were looking far too loose and baggy for a slim arm and hand. I rattled back and went for the ribbed ones instead, and the fit so far is as it should be.

    To get back to the wool itself, while ruck and maul are rugby terms, Ochil is the name of a range of hills between Stirling and Perth, not as large and dramatic as the Cairngorms of which Nan Shepherd writes, but fine enough nonetheless.

Lit. knit

 
 
    The new Penguin Classics edition of A Tale of Two Cities, its witty cover designed by Coralie Bickford-Smith (of course!). What would les tricoteuses say about being remembered in this way, I wonder.     

    In this article, you can see some of the things which inspire Coralie, including the bowl on which she based the cover for Love in a Dish and Other Pieces by M.F.K.Fisher. (The full set of the Great Food series of which that is part is here).

Lit. knit

    Another in our occasional and eccentric series of matching books to wool. It's very overcast here today and the light is dim so the colours aren't appearing quite true, but believe me when I say that Clare Morgan's A Book for All and None (more on it here) is a perfect match for Virtual Yarns's  Strabhann - click here and scroll down to read about the inspiration for the colour, where its name originates and a Gaelic song about a courtship of sorts.

More lit. knit

 

   This is Fyberspates Scrumptious Lace (45% silk, 55% merino) in 'Volcanic Flames', complementing the cover of Hedwig's Journey by Frederik van Eeden.

    With a thousand metres in the skein, knitting it up will be a journey in itself, and I've no idea what I might make with it - it arrived as a subscriber's gift from The Knitter magazine when I'd signed up in order to get some of Natalie's Knitting Vicar, but perhaps 'clerical pink' wouldn't have been my colour anyway?

Lit. knit

   Look what generous and thoughtful Lynne gave me the other day (as well as a book!): Mountain Colors Bearfoot in 'Mystic Lake'.

 

   Don't those blues in the yarn just pick up the cornflowers on the cover of our CBG August book?

 

Thankyou, Lynne.

Lit. knit

      Another daft but fun lit. knit post (and with colours rather bolder than we had in this one, or even this one). 

The book is, coincidentally, one I was writing about the other day, the excellent Ordinary Thunderstorms by William Boyd (though it's the hardback that's shown here), while the yarn is more of Natalie's.

     The novel's main character is called Adam Kindred; are book and yarn not  - wait for it - kindred spirits?

Lit. knit

   Just another daft bit of matching the reading matter to the yarn collection: this is the endpaper of The New House (see yesterday's post) which is 'Rope and Dandelion', a block-printed velvet designed in 1936 by Margaret Calkin James, together with some Yarn Yard Clan (the three small pictures are pretty accurate, colour wise).

   (There's more of this nonsense here). 

Knit lit.

    In a recent comment, Kate asked if there was ever a crossover of my knitting into my books, and the answer is that once in a while I notice the perfect match of book cover to yarn, put them together and do something silly like this! But it so happens that several recent acquisitions on both fronts are ripe for the pairing, so here they are:

        

     With my current reading, The Penguin Complete Sherlock Holmes by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (which I am so enjoying, by the way), is Yarn Yard Clan (100% merino) in a rich, warm, reddish-brown 'conker' shade.

A fascinating and very readable book next, one I keep dipping into, Perfumes: The A-Z Guide by Luca Turin and Tania Sanchez. Picking up its cover curlicues is more Clan, this time undyed 'Nude'.

        

      There's no mistaking the wonderful Alan Bennett and his Untold Stories. While Natalie claims to have been reproducing the conker's prickly green casing when she dyed this wool (Clan again), I suspect she nipped into AB's wardrobe and replicated his scarf!  

Co-ordination

   Surrounded as I am by books and yarn, I'm playing the idle game of co-ordinating reading and knitting, so here are a few examples from the current tottering book pile and the similarly growing yarn collection.
Not as obvious from the picture as in the flesh but the pale aqua of the jacket of Victoria Hislop's The Return, a dance-themed novel set in Spain, is a great match for this Shetland yarn (though there's precious little flamenco to be found in Lerwick, I imagine).


The black lace of the Kidsilk Haze scarf might suggest a fichu or shawl from Richardson's Pamela though would it inflame Mr. B, if worn by the eponymous heroine?


The sea greens and blues of this skein pick up on the maritime cover of Lloyd Jones's The Book of Fame,

  while the massive hedge on the front of Kipling's Selected Stories is perfect with the scarf in Posh Yarn Sophia "Undergrowth".