Literary yarning

This is the Lord of the Rings Crocheted Sweater that I finished making about a year ago. It's based on the Paton's book Granny Goes Wild!, but I had to do some major tweaking to get it to look right and to fit me. It's as cropped as it looks (hits me right where the waist joins the hips) and we won't talk about the circumference of my upper arms, thank you. And no, I'm not as big as that sweater looks.

The project was born when I saw the challenge in Handwoven magazine in 2004 (not sure of the publication date but I saw the article in January 04). The idea was to create a woven cloak based on the passage from J. R. R. Tolkien's Fellowship of the Ring, where the Elves give the hobbits and other travelers cloaks woven in Lorien. Here's the description:

For each they had provided a hood and cloak, made according to his size, of the light but warm silken stuff that the Galadhrim wore. It was hard to say of what colour they were: grey with the hue of twilight under the trees they seemed to be; and yet if they were moved, or set in another light, they were green as shadowed leaves, or brown as fallowed fields by night, dusk-silver as water under the stars...

"They are fair garments, and the web is good, for it was made in this land....Leaf and branch, water and stone: they have the hue and beauty of all these things under the twilight of Lorien that we love; for we put the thought of all that we love into all that we make....You are indeed high in the favour of the Lady! For she herself and her maidens wove this stuff..."*

For years, whenever I read that passage, I was inspired to think about how I would create such a cloak, but never got further than rolling it around in my mind. Then, the Handwoven challenge came out and the only thing stopping me from making one was the fact that I had no loom, and even then I had no idea how to use one if I had one. Additionally, I had never dyed wool or any other fiber so I couldn't scratch that itch by sitting down to spin the yarn to make it, which would take time and thought.

My inspiration wouldn't leave me alone this time, and I decided to do a crocheted color study based on Tolkien's description (and using commercial yarn) as a first step, because if there was only one project I wanted to do in a lifetime, it was to make that cloak. I figured that by the time I finished a sweater I'd know what colors I'd want to use, so it seemed a logical first step. Half a dozen trips to the LYS later I had a pile of varied wools and I began to put together granny squares from them. I decided immediately that to make the whole piece work, I'd need one consistent color to tie it all together, and that would be Brown Sheep Company's Nature Spun Sport in "Stone." All of the granny square yarns would be singles, in high-wool-content yarns, and the last row around the edge of each, the edging for the sweater itself, and the sleeves would be of the Stone. Whenever I traveled I looked at yarns for the sweater, and the first two skeins I ever saw of Noro Silk Garden became squares. I used some handpainted variegated skeins, and lots of Brown Sheep yarns.

There are buttonholes, but I haven't made the buttons yet. While the sweater was in full swing, our guild learned to use Fimo clay, and I conceived the idea of making small buttons to look like twigs, maybe in the shape of g-runes. Like many of my other projects, they're still "in the mind" and I want to wear the sweater now, so I use a silver filligree leaf pin to close it at the top.

Did I learn anything about color making this sweater? Yes, but I still didn't decide on definitive colors to match Tolkien's words. While in England last year, the Emperor and I followed Addison's Walk in Oxford, which was a place Tolkien was known to frequent. We were there at dusk, in the twilight, freezing our patoots off... and I didn't forget to look hard at the color of leaves and stone and water, and to photograph it, but even then I wasn't sure of what I saw. You know, with all of my art training you'd think this would be a simple thing.

Am I finished? With this sweater, yes (except for the buttons) but as for seeking the right color for my own elven cloak, no. I have the rest of my life to find it, so who's in a hurry?

*J. R. R. Tolkien, Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1987 Collector's Edition), 386.