This is part of the left-front. There is a band of deep ribbing that runs up the inner edge of each front; the buttonholes get knit into this (in the righthand piece) and for this side, this is where the buttons will eventually be attached. (I'm thinking I might try tracking down either wooden or tagua nut buttons, partly because the natural brownish color would look good but also because they'd be light. I think heavy buttons would drag a lot on this fabric and ruin its lines. Or maybe antler buttons, if I can find ones large enough: antler is very light)
I'm almost done with the waist decreases, then it's knit plain (or rather: "continue in pattern," doing the ribbing and stockinette) for a while, then a little bit of increasing for the bust, then the armholes...
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I also decided to go ahead and do my toenails again. I wound up buying a new color of varnish when I went out to get the topcoat to use with them. This color is a bit of a departure in that it's a more lavender pink than I normally would wear, but I rather like it.
I don't know that I'd ever be quite brave enough to wear traffic-cone orange, or bright green, or (for some reason, this is least appealing to me) blue nail polish (I think I don't like the idea of blue nails because I've seen too many semi-realistic police-procedurals with close-ups of dead hands and such)
This color is one of Revlon's shades, it's called Orchid.
I like it in part because I like the color, but I have to admit the color name also grabbed me. (That happens often. I've bought yarn at times in part because I liked the name given to the color, I liked the associations it conjured up in my mind). I liked the "orchid" name because it immediately made me think of Nero Wolfe. It's been a few years since I read any of the novels (but they still grace my bookshelves, and if I don't have a complete set of the books, I have darn near to one).
One of Wolfe's passions was orchids. In fact, he had a glasshouse on the roof of his brownstone where he raised them. (A big attraction of the books, for me, was the sort of wish-fulfillment life Wolfe lived: meals were strictly on time, business could not be discussed during meals, he had set hours for attending to his orchids, he didn't leave the house on business....many, many rules that in real life would probably be considered a compulsion worthy of a reality television show (I am sure Wolfe also hated television, or at least made the pretense of doing so, in the later books when television was commonplace) but that in the context of the novel, seemed wonderful.
I mean, would it not be delightful to have a Fritz to cook for you? Or to be able to dismiss work when you'd already felt you'd earned enough to keep yourself comfortable? Or to refuse to meet with someone if they were emotionally distraught or annoyed you in some way?)
Also, it's occasionally alluded to in the books, that despite Wolfe's supposed misogyny/fear of women, he would occasionally place a female witness so he could observe her legs as he sat at his desk. And he occasionally did seem to take a bit of a shine to certain women. And I'dlike to imagine that, as a not-too-terribly-preoccupied-with-the-"ordinary"-female-pursuits type of woman, and as someone with a reasonably large vocabulary (and as someone who definitely considers there to be a difference in meaning between "imply" and "infer"), that I might be the sort of female Wolfe might, just might, take a bit of a shine to (as long as I didn't blow it by reaching into my purse and pulling out my knitting during a lull in the meeting).
(Surely some of the rest of you lot occasionally write yourself into situations from the books you read?)
So I like the idea of orchid-colored nail varnish. (Sadly, today is a field-lab day, so they're covered up at the moment, deep in thick socks inside sturdy shoes. But maybe tomorrow I will wear a dress and sandals and get to look down at my feet and smile, even if no one else notices them.)
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