Sound and fury before the storm. A contest.

Sky Scarf, begun 2-23-13, showing only one day of blue sky since.

The current New England winter has organized life into milestones not dissimilar from Kübler-Ross's Stages of Grief and Dying: the Anticipation of Storms, the Fearful (and sometimes Angry/Fed Up/Curmudgeonly) Anticipation of storms (fomented and abetted by the Culture of Fear media, including and especially The Weather Channel and its team of storm-a-holic reporters), the Stoic Preparation for Storms (Bread? Check.  Milk? Check. Gasoline? Check.), the Experience of the Storm Itself, and the Passing of the Storm, when we all emerge from our hidey-holes and trade tales of what we endured during the storm.

Currently New England is in the Fearful Anticipation Stage, as the weather brewing is supposed to dump snow and freezing rain on us ferociously, starting any minute now or maybe tonight or maybe early in the morning; the tides are high and already eroding the beaches with surge; the northeast winds are gusting up to sixty+ miles per hour.

The wind-whipped Wood River, Woodville, RI, in Fearful Anticipation Mode.

So, to take our minds away from all the ominous, foreboding, depressing etc. of winter's last gasps (note to self:  Daylight Savings Time begins at 2 a.m. on Sunday March 10), I will draw your attention to a cute little book recently sent me by its publisher:

You might be wondering why I'm touting this, since this blog's focus is on New England--but, gentle knitters, I must confess that I was born and raised in New York City, and return there often. (In fact, I'm going to the Big Apple next week.)  And given that I'll be sitting around a lot during the next bout of Awful Weather, I'll at least start working on one of the clever designs in Knit New York.

British designer Emma King's patterns are all witty, but what really tickled me is a knitted Staten Island Ferry. It was my sad fate to spend my formative years on Staten Island, but my luck to commute from SI to New York on the ferry twice daily, whilst I attended Manhattan's High School of Performing Arts. Sailing past the Statue of Liberty every morning and afternoon, and Ellis Island, Governor's Island, and viewing the Verrazano Bridge in the distance, on the bright orange ferry with dark blue letters--there are many happy memories for me clustered around those commutes.

Furby's on the same page with me.  We will be knitting a ferry during the impending storm.

Other KIY NYC icons in the book are the Empire State Building, the Walk/Don't Walk street-crossing sign that all dyed-in-the-wool jaywalking New Yorkers ignore, and a red fire hydrant, etc.

The publisher, Collins and Brown, has kindly made a free copy of Knit New York available as a giveaway.  If you, dear readers, will post a brief comment here explaining why you'd like the book, I'll choose a winner--contest closes on Sunday the 10th at midnight! (Please note:  the contest is limited to people with mailing addresses in the US.)

O.k., time to batten down the hatches!

Sky in a basket, sky in a scarf

Well, here's the view from the second floor of my house. A few things might jump out at you, like the fallen tree that (sob) used to tether my beloved clotheslines. The tree was a casualty of the blizzard oddly called Nemo (Latin:  no one).  And you might also notice the dregs of snow on either side of the Wood River. What you probably haven't thought much about, though, is the sky. In the photo it's relatively flat and seems unimportant. The color is that of skim milk--kind of white with sickly blue-grey around the edges. The sky has been this color, or much greyer, for most of February. It is a February New England sky.

I've been thinking a lot about the sky because I'm making a Sky Scarf. I suppose you could call this project conceptual knitting and maybe aleatory knitting, too, since random factors come into play. (For more information about this see the charming website called Leaf Cutter Designs.) The color of the scarf depends on the color of the sky wherever you happen to be. Every day for a year the knitter looks at the sky and knits a stripe representing the sky's color.

I began knitting on 23 February, my birthday, and will conclude on the eve of my next birthday. Let's hope I get to use some of the bluer colors in the foreseeable future!