Color therapy

Crafty Sunday

Some were beading.
Sylvan, carefully threading the tiniest beads onto wire:
Jonas, making earrings to sell at the fair next fall, to earn some money towards next year's skiing habit:
At $15 these lovelies are priced to sell! Let's hope the "age 11" minimum is slightly flexible by a few weeks...

And the new knitting project, a shawl, first seen on Soule Mama's blog a few week's back. Called Simple, Yet Effective 2.0, the pattern is here. It's not free, but it's still good! It calls for one skein of Noro Kureyon sock yarn, which is self-blending, and I used it for my birthday socks last year. (And oh my gosh, if you look at that post, the sweetness of raindrops on irises in June!). For this pattern, you split the skein and alternate the balls so you get stripes.
For this shawl, I chose something in the rainbow family, mostly because I like the idea of wearing rainbows around my shoulders in bleakest March. But rainbows also have special meaning for me and my name: Iris is the goddess of the rainbow in the Greek Pantheon. When my mom was pregnant with me she saw more rainbows in those nine months than in her whole life! (Wait, what part of that last paragraph gave it away that I am a child of the 70s?)

I had overthought this simple shawl and won't bore you with the details, but I decided after about 8" that I didn't love the way the stripes were alternating. So last night ripped it all out, rewound one of the balls and began again. Much better this time, proving to me that listening to my inner-ickometer is better than listening to my husband because we don't always share the same aesthetic.
Both portraits are hanging in my dining room now. At right, the photo taken by my husband when Jonas was just a small angel, maybe only a year old or so; the shiny glass made photographing it here challenging. At left, the portrait in oil crayon by my brother (first seen here) and given to me this February. Two of my most favorite fellows.