What Happened with the Rug, Part I
The thing about the rug was that it was a stash-busting exercise. So you’re supposed to grab all your felt-able wool, find a neutral, knit two-color squares with one strand always the neutral, crochet them together using the neutral yarn, felt the whole darn thing, and ta-da! you have yourself a Felted Patchwork Rug. The pattern is from Barbara Albright’s Odd Ball Knitting, a very fine book.
The knitting, however, is by me — and therein, as always, lies the problem.
I will say that I don’t necessarily believe that cream is a neutral any more.
So the cream-colored yarn seems to have heightened the contrast between the various colors, which is fine, but not helpful. Also, I thought nothing of putting both orange and pink in the same project, and that was a mistake.
Adding More Color Doesn't Work
I kept adding more and more colors, thinking that would fix the problem. At some point, I thought, I’d throw in one more square — and the whole thing would gel in some mysterious way, and for the rest of our lives Andy and I would look at the rug and think, “There’s that miraculous rug made of little scraps of nothing.”
Pink and Orange?!?
This did not happen.
It persisted in not happening for quite some time. Indeed, it has never happened, and at some point I did have to accept that it would not happen. The rug would not be the thing of beauty of which I dreamed. I clearly had some kind of obscure color-blindness that had to do with combining color; incidentally, this explained my difficulty dressing myself in a reasonable way. Everything made sense, and other than being doomed to a life of knitting ugly items (something to which I had been accustomed for some time anyway) we would all get along just fine.
Either that, or I could ask for help.
Later: Part II
Knit Like You Mean It. 