Birds on socks
Socks about birds, part 3
Last week, I was telling you about choosing some colour palettes to represent birds. The next step was mapping those colours onto a sock. My original plan was all eight birds on one sock, but after some sketching and some math, I realized that would make for either very narrow stripes or very, very long socks.
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Many sketches later, I decided I liked a few things: a long-short-short striping pattern, some white/beige space to separate the birds, and arranging the colours so that the darkest stripe is in the middle of each bird.
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I’m going to fast forward through the next little bit. I took some colours that looked nice on the screen and tried to put them on yarn and got some feedback and tried again. It’s slow, one-step-at-a-time work that only seems exciting in movie montages. So, if you will, please imagine a series of short clips of me mixing dye, using a scale, frowning and scribbling in a notebook, swirling liquid in an erlenmeyer flask (I don’t use one IRL but it looks cooler than a dixie cup for our montage), and nodding to myself as I inspect wool, all while the Led Zeppelin in the background gets louder and louder.
Also, I am played by Clare Danes in this montage. Got it? Great.
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Tadaah!
That Before photo wasn’t my first attempt, just the first decent looking one and also the first that I thought to photograph. We mix all our colours using four primaries (CMYK, like a printer) and while I do have a whole catalog of colour swatches to start with, there’s usually a bit of trial and error if I’m trying to match a particular colour.
The other thing I did between these two photos was knit a sock. I don’t usually do any knitting for these collaborations since I’m just the Yarn Person and Andrea Rangel is the Pattern Person. But Andrea was busy at the time with a couple other projects and I was so jazzed about it I just had to give it a try. More on that next time.
Four vertical, striped bars visualizing possible sock layouts. Each “bird” consists of three or four stripes. From left to right, the first option has four colours per bird and no white space between birds. The lack of separation between birds is great from a blast of colour point of view, but less great from a data visualization point of view.
The second option has three colours per bird, a beige stripe between birds, and one long stripe per bird. Not only do I think the long stripe looks good, but it creates a tiny canvas on which to display/knit the annual frequency data from the checklist.
The third option is the same as the second, but instead of a long-short-short striping pattern, it’s short-short-short. I also rearranged the colours in some of the birds and decided it looks best if there is some consistency between birds - I like the darkest (lowest value) colour in the middle.
The fourth and final option was actually the first I did and it’s just one stripe per bird, arranged in colour order. Cute, but useless.
I’m not sure why I’m keeping all this in the image description in the footnotes. Would it make more sense in the main text? Maybe, but here we are.
Five sock sketches, all based on the second option from the earlier graphic. In this case, I’ve broken each vertical bar in half to represent a pair of socks. Imagine a toe at the bottom and a cuff at the top. It’s all the same birds, just in different orders.
I updated this sketch several times throughout the process, so some of the options on the left have the long stripe at the top, while the others have the long stripe at the bottom. And the orange-red of the Northern Flicker was promoted from a small stripe to a long stripe much later in the process. Andrea pointed out that it would make life easier for future knitters to have a clear transition from beige to orange in the direction of the knitting, rather than the iffy shift from beige to also beige but a bit darker.
Before and After knitted tubes. I added names for all the birds represented: American Goldfinch, Rufous Hummingbird, Great Blue Heron, Mallard, Varied Thrush, Anna’s Hummingbird, Northern Flicker, and Steller’s Jay. You can see that some birds remained the same, like the Goldfinch and Steller’s Jay, white others changed significantly, like the Great Blue Heron and Varied Thrush. Thanks, instagram, for your excellent feedback.
The other difference between the two is that the colours in the After look overall more vibrant. This isn’t a change I made on purpose, this was a side effect of working with a new batch of wool from the mill. Different fibres take dye differently and even through they’re both the same blend of 80% Superwash Merino/20% nylon, I can see a change in how the final colours come out. This is a story for another time, but it has been a headache for us the past year so I just can’t resist the opportunity to rant about it. <Shakes fist at sky while yelling MERINOOOOO.>
I love the description of the movie montages, because of course, that is how I see all of this happening. Claire Daines is a great choice. Seriously, this really helped me to understand all of the thought and effort that goes into the creative process. I love those skeins (planets, you had me at Mercury!) so much!
I love this so much!!! Please keep posting, as it's so wonderful to hear the nitty gritty nerdy part about how you do what you do. It's why I love your newsletters, and find your company to be so fascinating. I can't wait to order this yarn for socks!!!
also, side note, I think it would be helpful to have the image description right under the photo, so we don't have to scroll back and forth. If that's not possible, in the main text would be great! Thank you for this, and so excited for Friday!