Shades of blue

It is good to be back.

My mother's garden in Kent is a beautiful place to be.  It is overflowing with flowers both vibrant in colour and splendid in form.  When walking alongside the raised flowerbeds you can almost hear the blooms jostling for attention; 'come look at me', they each chime!

In amongst this undiluted fun of colour and shape I was seeking out during my stay a flower to match this shade of Duck Egg Blue:

It was not an easy task to find the right blue.  I thought I had struck gold when I found a discreet forget-me-not nestled beside a mass of lady's mantle under my parent's old pear tree. I travelled further afield in the same county to my godmother's garden where I found blue hydrangeas heavy as cannonballs.

Neither was quite the right hue.

However it does not really matter, I chide myself, for until I reach perfection in my knitting (although I would be happy enough with almost perfect) I will not require the perfect shade of blue.

And because practice makes perfect I have used the same Rose Cardigan pattern as for Cardigan Angelica.

Here is:

Hydrangea

 or

Forget-me-not

or perhaps

A simple knit with an overly fancy name

You choose ;-) 

While knitting this cardigan during my holidays my thoughts often turned to Anita; another lover of blue. Castles Crowns and Cottages is visual poetry coupled with thought provoking messages. Dear Anita because your work is a symphony of blues - and other colours too - I dedicate my humble knit to you.

Speaking of other colours...

I fell in love this week.  Smack, bang, wallop. 

I was blissfully sauntering through the different colours offered by Madelinetosh yarns - rather like some would take a trip along the Venetian canals - as I NEEDED a dk yarn for a future project which will remain secret for the time being.

As my eye roamed from Boxwood to Celadon past Hollyhock and Golden Hickory I saw

Mansfield Garden Party

How fabulous!  I rushed to my battered copy of The Collected Stories of Katheirne Mansfield and read The Garden Party.  To get an idea of the colours of the Mansfield Garden Party yarn here is the introductory paragraph to the story:

And after all the weather was ideal.  They could not have had a more perfect day for a garden-party if they had ordered it.  Windless, warm, the sky without a cloud.  Only the blue was veiled with a haze of light gold, as it is sometimes in early summer.  The gardener had been up since dawn, moving the lawns and sweeping them, until the grass and the dark flat rosettes where the daisy plants had been seemed to shine.  As for the roses, you could not help feeling they understood that roses are the only flowers that impress people at garden-parties; the only flowers that everybody is certain of knowing.  Hundreds, yes, literally hundreds, had come out in a single night; the green bushes bowed down as though they had been visited by archangels.

If you are not familiar with this wonderful short story you will find it in this edition.  For those who wish to see if their mind's eye has conjured up a good picture of the yarn in question you may either wait until mine wings its way over from The States or take a peek at this photo.

While I mostly agree with Jane Brocket's opinion on similar yarns here I find Mansfield Garden Party yarn totally seductive.  What can I say?  I am a fool for literary names and greedy for colour.