Day Four: The Rainbow Connection

I have changed colors when the pattern calls for it.  I have even changed colors every two rows for the Mason-Dixon Genius Baby Burpcloth.  And I've double-knit a hotpad with two different colors.  But I've never tried stranded color work or intarsia.  Those techniques may be my answer to the question posed on day four of Knitting and Crochet Blog Week: is there a knitting skill you hope to learn one day...

Pictures of works-in-progress using two or more colors within a row look all at once fun and very, very fiddly.  Pictures of finished pieces, though, look amazing.  Of all the knitting techniques I've come across, color work seems to me to be the I-have-now-arrived-as-a-knitter skill.

I looked through some patterns to see if I might list a few that seemed magnificent and yet manageable as a first attempt at color work, and realized that before I can learn that technique I have to learn how to read a chart.  I've only ever used written out instructions, reveling in the lines of k's and p's and ssk's and tbl's in something of the same way I revel in reading lines of music notes on a staff.  So that's two skills I hope to learn!  Then I could make the Bird in Hand Mittens, or the Anemoi Mittens, or anything argyle.

I'm not sure these colorful techniques would have come to mind had I not seen some lovely color work patterns on people's blog posts from Tuesday of this week (this one, in particular, caught my eye).  There's another rainbow connection, though, that perhaps led me to choose this knitting aspiration.  God willing and the creek don't rise (and the rain don't fall!), Friday afternoon will be May Day at the Episcopal school where I serve as chaplain.  From our littlest 3-year-olds to our third graders, students dance on the field to sweet and lively music (this year it's all muppet music, honoring our beloved Mississippian, Jim Henson).  Then the fourth graders ever-so-formally process to the maypoles, take the rainbow of ribbons, and waltz in and out...in and out...in and out...

Beautiful color work, no?