January and the Goldilocks Principle

"The Goldilocks Principle is named by analogy to the children's story, The Three Bears, in which a little girl named Goldilocks tastes three different bowls of porridge, and she finds that she prefers porridge which is neither too hot nor too cold, but has just the right temperature. Since the children's story is well known across cultures, the concept of "just the right amount" is easily understood and is easily applied to a wide range of disciplines, including developmental psychology, biology, economics and engineering." (Wikipedia, so it must be true...)

I've been much reminded of Goldilocks this month, and am delighted to learn that she has a principle! Here at Hookery, we seem to be applying our heroine's scientific quest for just the right colours to our temperature scarves and our one temperature afghan! And the expression on our fine leader's fairytale face says it all! As our real-life leader said this week, "Crochet is supposed to be stress-relieving not stress-inducing!"

We started well, deciding to start the new year with the Internet phenomenon of the temperature scarf: one row every day with the colour decided by the temperature of that day. The extremely committed among us are using two colours per day so that they can also have a record of the weather itself. It all sounded very straightforward in its sheer simplicity- one row a day would be achievable even by me! We by no means expected that we would want to do so much tweaking as the month went on, in a search of the Platonic ideal of a colour range.

This was Heather's first plan: cool colours for the wintry winter we are having here in Northern Ireland, with our third snow falls of the season today. It all looked so promising on the colour card, but didn't feel right, and husbands were feeling the strain, "I’ve got to live through every torturous moment of this!", so...

This is Heather's second line up but it still didn't just quite hit the mark. Thus we can't yet show and tell Heather's month of January, but we can show the wide range of favourite Heather weather contenders (and Mags' favourite socks):

Catherine is our resident geographer, so obviously her scarf has to be meteorologically accurate. Now Catherine has managed to stay happy with her colours, but has completely changed the style. She began with ripples, saving up the first few days of January for her hotel room in England while on a course,

but has since changed to rows that alternate between doubles with chains, and trebles with chains. Here is Catherine's January, although the picture does not justice at all to the glitter of the snow days:

 Helena is the rock. She found colours from her, so far from insubstantial that I don't know how she fits her family into the house, stash, and has so far stuck to her hooks. She must be the exception that proves the Goldilocks rule! Well, she and Chloe both. Chloe took a bit of inclement time to decide on her colour options before starting, but is very happy with them all. Chloe is a most interesting member of our group- youngest hooker by far and she works on a loom!

 And here is the month of January for Chloe, with pretty pins holding the end in place until it shall be sewn up at year's end:

Mags decided that, because all her clothes are navy, or something resembling navy, she wanted a mostly navy scarf. Off she set with delight at a project that she might actually be able to finish in the same time as everybody else!

And she was pretty happy with the result, but then thought afterwards that it would have been quite nice to get a spot of gold in on day 6, which had been her parents' 50th wedding anniversary. This spawned the thought that she would have  a fiftieth thing of her own later in the year, so discussions on how to backtrack emerged for her too. Out it all came! She took the opportunity to add a bit of a snow option regardless of temperature. Kipper was very positive about snow!

Mags also had a Goldilocks moment when she decided against the gorgeously lovely merino wool green that she had to rush out and buy when we had an unseasonally warm day last week. She needed a more traditional Aran feel to match the other temperatures, and Niqi's stash came to the rescue. So, here is the month of January for Mags, and yes, her edges are characteristically awful:

Niqi is not making a scarf. She is working on a granny afghan with detail to match Catherine the geographer! The inner circles represent the day's temperature at exactly 2pm in exactly the spot of our borough where she lives; then the outer squares represent the day's predominant weather feature- with precedence given to rainbows, snow and fog! All has been going very smoothly, even down to the joining of each small square as she goes. Her Goldilocks Principle only screamed, "Halt" when she visited Northern Ireland's first Range store and found the Platonic ideal of rainbow yarn, so out went a too bold rainbow day to be replaced with one that was just right! Here is the month of January for Niqi:

And so, here endeth the Hookery weather report for this month! Tune in next time to see if February heats up, if there will have been any more glittery snow, and if the Heather Weather cloud finally bursts to rain row upon row of climate joy! We do discuss the weather a lot here in Northern Ireland- but these projects have certainly made the whole process of weather watching much more creative!