A Swift Catch-Up

Apologies for a blog silence tend to be tedious so I'll keep it brief: more than two months without a post - man alive, what have I been doing?!

Well, acquiring an antique swift for Christmas, for one thing...

 I can't really use that as excuse for not blogging, though, can I...

I'll resolve to do better, and make a swift getaway.

'I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each'

Sometimes I think I spend longer dreaming about what to knit while travelling than I do actually travelling. I shall be spending about nine hours on trains over the next few days (I'm grateful that there will be any trains for me to take - I didn't think I was going to make it home this holiday with the possible strike), and so for most of today my thoughts flitted from wherever they were supposed to be focussed to prospective knittish ways to fill this time.

When I really start thinking about matching yarns and patterns, it can become quite an involved imaginative voyage. I had previously seen the green of the yarn above as summer shoots and juicy grass, but suddenly it transformed before my eyes from leaves under the sun to fronds under the water, and I knew I wanted to make a Laminaria. Lots of knitters seem to endow yarn with the faculty for reason ('it hasn't decided what it wants to be yet'), which seems ridiculous until you experience that moment of epiphany, when a clear decision emerges as if by magic from a mire of uncertainty. This one was accompanied by mermaids swimming through the underwater kingdom I was about to create, much like this old Levis advert, but with more knitting.

What's that? You want another gratuitous swift-in-motion shot? Oh, ok, if you insist. 

Ah Jonathan...

Introducing Jonathan

... Jonathan Swift, that is! He arrived in a very exciting, wood-scented package today from Sunflower Swifts, and I immediately took him for a spin. Jonathan Swift made short shrift of a generously-proportioned skein of Dream in Color Smooshy, certainly more so than the precarious acrobatics I had previously been engaging in, holding the skein with my knees. As well as being wondrously practical, he is also a beautifully crafted object. Every detail is carefully thought through, down to the inclusion of five pegs ('in case you lose one'!). I'm so pleased! Jonathan has made my heart beat a little swifter.