For Knit and Crochet Blog Week, Day 2….Eskimimi has given us an assignment:

Your task today is to either think of or research a project that embodies that house/animal. It could be a knitting or crochet pattern – either of the animal itself or something that makes you think of the qualities of that house.

Alternatively it could be a type or colour of yarn, or a single button. Whatever you choose, decide upon a project and blog about how and why it relates to your house/creature.

Interesting….and thought provoking.  If I am truly a Bee, flitting from WIP to WIP…then how can I possibly pick just one mascot project?  Isn’t that contraindicated by my very Bee nature?

I keyed the word “bee” into Ravelry, and got about 20 pages of patterns.  Some had Bee in the title; some others had it in the designer or store name (you cannot imagine how many “Purl Bee” patterns there were!).  And thus began my hunt.

I have to say, straightaway, yellow is perhaps the colour I like least.  In fact, I’d go so far as to say I quite dislike it.  So anything bee-striped was out of the question.  I am actually knitting on a pair of socks now where the yarn has about six colours in it and all the black and yellow have pooled in the leg if the first sock.  I have taken to calling it, with very little love, “the bumblebee sock”…but I digress.

I don’t knit toys, so knitted bees and their like were also not options.  My main likes, knitting-wise, are scarf/shawls, socks and cowls, with some hats thrown in for good measure.  I ran across several socks, but the stitch patterns didn’t appeal to me at the time (mind you, it was 6 AM and I was barely awake!).  I did see some shawls and scarves…but really only zeroed in on two.

The first was Anne Hanson’s les Abeilles.

Photo By Knitspot

In spite of the fact that it’s yellow, I really did like it.  I thought it was pretty, and likely “shiny” enough to cause me to drop what I am working on to cast it on.  But what, I wondered, would be interesting enough to keep me from doing just that?  Nothing too complex so as to frustrate me, but nothing so boring as to make me put it down and walk away from it in search of something more interesting.

And then I saw this…the second pattern that made me hit my “Favourite” button this morning:

Photo by Blue Bee Studio

It’s called Millrace Shawl, and the reason it cropped up in my search is because the publisher is Blue Bee Studio.  The reason I chose this as my “mascot project” is simple.  First off, it is my very favourite construction – sideways.  Usually, this means that if one is careful, one can use up nearly all of a precious skein of yarn while not running out.  (Let’s not talk about the one on my coffee table right now that I left plenty of yarn to finish and yet managed to run out anyway!)

It has a garter stitch body…which means very little to which I have to pay attention.  Then the edging (which is knit as you go) adds just enough interest not to bore me to tears (not, I might add, that this occurs frequently – I have knit stockinette socks and loved every minute of them!).  The perfect combination of soothing garter and an interesting edge might actually negate my Bee-like tendency to wander off to something new.  And as an aside…it calls for 575 yards of fingering weight yarn…the exact length of a skein of Wollmeise Pure, of which there happens to be a couple of skeins just languishing in my stash.

Well…how about that for serendipity?