No knitting content today but I do have something to share.



DH & I have become completely addicted to the Teaching Company. They find the best professors in the country and sell their lectures on history, science, math, literature, art, music, and religion. You can purchase DVDs, videotapes, CDs, or audiotapes of the lectures. So far we've listened to Voltaire and the Triumph of the Enlightenment and American Religious History (fascinating and highly recommended!) and we're in the middle of the High Middle Ages. I get to choose our next course so it will probably be astronomy or art or classical music. Listening to a class is prime knitting time.



There are some free lectures they email me about that anyone can listen to if you'd like to test them out. First, in honor of the 60th anniversary of D-Day coming up, they have a professor who teaches WWII Military History doing a free 30-minute lecture called Eisenhower and Operation Overlord. To listen to it, go HERE and you can either listen to a stream on your computer, download it or burn it to a CD. This offer expires July 3, 2004.



They also offer two free 30 minutes lectures titled Fact and Fiction in the Da Vinci Code by a biblical expert HERE. This free lecture expires September 6, 2004. I haven't listened to any of these yet but I urge you to try them out. I am finding the professors all vary a bit in style but they are all passionate about the subjects. If this sounds like your cup of tea, I recommend you order their free print catalog which offers more information about the specific classes than the web site. Also, all the classes are on sale throughout the year so choose the sale classes or they can be quite expensive. On sale though they seem less expensive than books on tape.



Photos today include Jack the cat and Peaches the rabbit sharing a snack of Peaches' special home-grown oat grass.

MORE ON COLOR







I don't normally use multi-colored yarns but lately I've been thinking of lace socks so I purchased these yarns from Smileys.

I also want to do fair isle socks with one strand solid color and strand multi-colored yarn - one of the old Socka books has some nice patterns. I purchased three skeins of each color because this particular yarn,Calzetteria Cervinia, has lower yardage than most sock yarns.



I was watching a design show on BBCAmerica last night that focused on color. They had some psychologists who said that we all determine our color preferences by the time we are in our teens. They also said that most children under five prefer reds, yellows, and oranges. After five they start to like blues and greens.



They discussed a study where they put participants in either a blue room with blue lights or a red room with red lights. Not only did the subjects in the blue room start having more relaxing brain waves but they also were colder even though the rooms were the same temperature.



Then they showed a bright red on the screen and asked everyone to really stare at it. Then they asked you to close your eyes. You should see then see green, red's contrast color on the color wheel.



The show provided some additional help to those of us looking to add more color to our homes. First of all, if you want to paint a swatch of a color on a wall to test it out, do it on both sides of a corner so you can see the color in shadow as well. Secondly, consider the color of the light that comes in from outside. For instance, if you have yellow walls but big windows looking out on a lot of green lawn, the light coming in from outside will have a green tinge and turn your yellow more greenish.



Sheila from Fiber Raven Soiree has an excellent color sense that I envy greatly (she can design fair isle color schemes with ease!) and she once said in a post on ASOFlives that to remember that even shadows have colors. I never thought about it but she's right.

The color knitting booklet is finished. Now I am just waiting for the first copy to make sure it is formatted right before I can offer it for sale. I think it should be ready in about a week. If any of you out there are thinking about self-publishing, I really recommend Cafepress. The process was simpler than I expected. You need to download some free software to turn your book into a .PDF file and then just upload the whole thing. There's a message board for other self-publishers which I also found helpful.



The book is 36 pages and has twelve chapters - Stranded Color Knitting vs. Intarsia, Choosing Colors and Yarn Substitutions, How to Hold the Yarns, Floats vs. Weaving, Knitting from Charts, Tension Problems, Color Jogs, Blocking Your Knitting, Dealing in the Ends, Easy Colorwork Cap, Norwegian Star Hat, and Bibliography and Recommended Web Sites.





I used the least expensive binding method, somewhat like a comic book. The final price is $9.99 which means about $4.60 is earned for the nonprofit House Rabbit Society. The money earned will be divided - 50% will go to our regional group Four Corners Bunnies. We have a HRS fosterer who generally has about 15 rabbits in foster care, mostly received from the humane society. The other 50% will go to the Colorado House Rabbit Society in Denver. They are quite large and have their own shelter and lots of fosterers. Most of the money will go directly to them for food, shelter, and veterinary expenses but we're going to use a small amount of that money to pay postage and expenses for a program to spin and knit up shelter bunny fur products for their gift shop. I'm unsure how much bunny fur they have but once we get started that may be a blog project as well if there are people out there who'd like to either spin or knit items with bunny fur (angora as well as short-haired rabbits - some of it may be blended with wool).



Not terribly exciting but here's the cover for the booklet.