I am determined to share a few thoughts before I lose them entirely in the PPP (Pre-Beach Prepping & Packing)! Tomorrow, I fully expect (from 40+ years’ experience) that I will have no brain for anything but the game of what-to-take and the methodical madness of gathering and bagging up all that I think we need. Or might need. Or could possibly need.
Today I used some of my pre-PPP brain to finish an expansive cable chart for one of my knitting students. This behemoth is 113 stitches wide and 53 rows high. It covers 32″ x 15″ of graph paper — and, no, I do not have a giant pad of graph paper. I taped 8 1/2 x 11 pages together.
The chart is all marked out by hand in pencil (I have learned by bitter experience not to write charts in pen!).
Probably there is a way to do all this on the computer. Maybe it would even be faster. But I like doing my charts by hand this way. Maybe it is kind of like knitting, methodically satisfying. Maybe it just seems more real to me — in an old school way — than symbols tapped out onto a screen. I am of that vintage, I guess.
I freely admit that I prefer the black-and-white photos of stitch patterns in Barbara Walker’s books to the color photos in recent stitch-tionaries. The stark and simple photos show the articles so clearly. I suspect it has something to do with the translation of 3-D to 2-D, something to do with shadows, and perhaps the complexity of color photography.
But it also just seems fitting. When I was young, it seemed that everything serious and of importance was shown in black-and-white. We did not have a color TV until I was 11 years old. And even then, all the iconic old shows, the classic movies were in stately b & w. Science text book photos, pictures in my parents’ albums, history itself were all b & w.
So I suppose that is why even in this amazing digitalized age with the world at our tapping fingertips, I retain a certain affection and even reverence for black-and-white photos and hand drawn illustrations, for pencil scratching on paper.
And isn’t it a beautiful chart?