Harry's Poll Results

Harry and I totalled up all the votes (including those posted to Knitter's Review instead of here) and the results are:

Blue: 23
Red: 10
Undecided: 1
Wants a neutral color instead: 1

What was especially interesting about the results was that the Blues tended to vote in the morning and the Reds in the evening. I am sure a psychologist could have a field day with this information. Are Blues morning people and Reds night prowlers? Or is it the amount of daylight present that skews the vote? Or is breakfast a bluer meal than dinner?

Anyway, Harry was still waffling, and promised to dust the shoji screens if I would knit some swatches.

Harry had the swatches evaluated by two engineer buddies, who thought the Gentle yarn had more structural integrity.


Of course, structural integrity is all well and good, but he wanted some subjective opinions too. So he called Bertie, Elvis, Winston, and Nagini over to take a peek.

Poll results:

Very Tasty: 2
Nice Slither Texture: 1
Excellent Nesting Potential: 1

After explaining the concept of an opinion poll to the gang One More Time, the results became:

Orange: 1
Polka Dots: 1
Green: 1
Wants a neutral color instead: 1

I have to say that, while I was really, really leaning towards the blue when comparing the skeins, the red looks so much richer and blocks out with more character.

Plug for Gentle yarn

This stuff is just fabulous to knit with. It is quite elastic, allowing needle acrobatics that would stretch or break other yarns. It feels heavenly and comes in 33 gorgeous colors, too.

Gentle is cobweb weight (6265 yards/lb), but if you are in the market for something finer, check out Yarn Place's Angel (8323 yards/lb). It's 100% merino that feels like cashmere and comes in 16 lovely colors.

To give you a comparison, Heirloom Knitting's Merino Lace is about 7000 yards/lb and their Gossamer Merino is about 11,000 yards/lb. The former comes in 28 colors and the latter in naturalwhite/ecru.

I ordered some of the Merino Lace a while back, but thought it oddly coarse--I'll trade it away at some point. The Gossamer feels wonderful, but I can't see myself knitting white for months on end. (Lyn, if you are reading this, we need some gossamer-weight Gentle!).

And so, to sum up this mildly rambling post, even though the blue color shimmers from the hand of an expert dyer, the red is just more appealing. Furthermore, the red goes better with Harry's complexion and most importantly, would be more difficult for the covert ops folks to track me via satellite.